To contact me, please send E-mail to:
Al (al@afs4dna.com)
Current telephone contact via: 919-323-7585
FAX number: 919-321-0216
Remember Al when you need a bioinformatics consultant.
Computational Biology Consulting Services
Beginning with Fall, 2009 I am pleased to be working as a bioinformatics educator at the Rockefeller University in New York City. Any new engagements must not be in conflict with my full-time gig, either in time commitments or in conflict of interest. Please inquire for details. My consultations are about solving your problems and advancing your science, using creativity, drive, and broad experiences. What services do you need to energize your scientific discovery efforts? Call me now!
I have provided a broad range of services to my clients, based on strong understandings of technical concepts and issues.
I have conceived and developed stand-alone programs and pipelines, developed and offered exceptional training programs and
offered strategic advice to start-ups that pointed them in valuable and
successful directions. I
have taken slow codes and optimized them for specialized hardware,
and developed friendly interfaces for ugly programs (MasPar's vintage
version of MPSRCH, vowels sold separately, is the ultimate justification for this assertion).
I have advised companies and individuals on technology acquisitions and intellectual property concerns, and spent
considerable time with start-up companies in their initial assessment
and strategy sessions.
My central theme has been to provide bioinformatics consultant services that make a difference in the scientific life of my client companies. Some of my core activities have revolved around the process of insuring that the owners of new technology are able to accomplish the scientific tasks for which they purchased new hardware and/or software.
My work is consulting in the truest sense--> I have helped to ensure success at a diverse collection of goals and needs! My actual work varied with my client's needs, but has certainly included design and implementation of custom applications, optimization/speed-up of programs, design and delivery of excellent technical training and education, systems integrations, as well as timely, cogent, and relevant strategic advice and direct support for technical marketing and sales efforts.
My practice spans much of the breadth of a new discipline. Computational biology is a very rapidly developing field, evolving from its origins in bioinformatics, computer science, mathematics, molecular biology and other traditional and non-traditional disciplines.
Any consultant must be a mix of many skills, sometimes playing the statesman , and sometimes playing the magician , but always being flexible and focused on meeting the client's real needs. Call now to see how I can help to energize your discovery effort!
Some notable community activities
CSB, sponsored by the Life Sciences Society has been a project of mine since its origins as the IEEE CSB. In 2006-7, I served as chair of the Tutorial Committee. I've been in various supporting roles since 2001. The 2009 conference returns to Stanford in mid-August. For info about this year, click CSB2009.
From 2001 through 2006, I enjoyed teaching classes in bioinformatics data analysis, and modelling, as a part-time instructor, in the award-winning certificate program offered by the University of California at Santa Cruz extension program in Silicon Valley and also at the University of California Berkeley's Extension program. I look forward to returning to the classroom again soon, and would welcome training and teaching opportunities.
Some Posters and Talks to break out of my more customary non-disclosure mode which regrettably prevents discussion of most of my projects:
50th Maize Genetics Conference: Research poster: "Syngenta's Maize Allelic Diversity Platform", Sonali Gandhi et. al.
Pacific Biocomputing Symposium 1999 Research Poster described work on EST clustering using Smith-Waterman analysis on the TimeLogic DeCypher accelerator.
ISMB 1999 Research Poster described a nucleic-sequence data mining tool for processing/browsing frameshift Smith-Waterman outputs beginning from protein motifs and fragments, which was developed with Keith Joho for use at Roche Bioscience. The same facility was later used in an interesting micro-array probe-design application.
ISMB 2000 TimeLogic's poster titled "Analytical Methods for Genome to Genome Comparisons". (joint author; Principal author Marty Gollery, is once again working directly at Time Logic, now a branch of Active Motif).
September, 2001 talk at Bay Area Bioinformatics group, "What have they done to my BLAST?"
While most of my clients are kept in confidence, and covered by formal non-disclosure requirements, several of my associations are reasonably well known, and happily advertised. For now, let us spotlight my longest-running client, TimeLogic , with whom I worked for over six years, prior to their move to Carlsbad, and also to briefly lament the trends that have swallowed up such favorite former Bay Area clients as Systemix (folded into Novartis), Abgenix (now a part of Amgen) and Sugen (which became part of Pharmacia/Upjohn before disappearing into Pfizer).
You can find my current hangouts on this map
TeraClu software, originally created for clustering EST data
on TimeLogic Systems, is potentially to be re-created as version 3, with the
ability to work with raw/nextgen sequence data. Advisors and beta testers
are needed! (please e-mail al@afs4dna.com if you are interested)
Books For Sale
Book from personal, family and select sources now available through
Amazon Marketplace and also from
Biblio.com.
Web 2.0 Network presences: I am on LinkedIn! After a bit of consideration, I am currently not participating in organized boredom (Twitter), the bioinformatics blogosphere (if you want to know what I think about current issues, please write or call!), marketing scams masquerading as contact networks (plaxo, xing, adult-friend-finder, ...), or standardized social networking (myspace, facebook). Write to me and tell me why I am wrong! (You still can hear me singing to the people that don't listen to the things that I am saying praying someone's gonna hear...)
Please note that absolutely Nobody at afs4dna.com is involved with the promotion of ANY stock on ANY market, nor am I sending word-salad spams about pharmaceuticals, penile enlargement devices or anything else. Multiple recent SPAM campaigns forging domain addresses at afs4dna.com are unauthorized, untrustworthy and of criminal origin. Please do not purchase any product or participate in any scheme marketed via spam mailings. For details about the stocks promoted in these unauthorized mailings, I recommend spamnation's stock site
Also, please note that I am not offering employment to anyone at this time, and most particularly, I am not offering employment to new graduates of bioinformatics programs at any level of education (masters, Ph.D., certificate or bachelors) regardless of location or degree of prestige (including MIT, Harvard, UCSC, Chicago, Tata and any of the distinguished institutions with the initials IIT). Please do not include AFS Informatics in bulk e-mailing of resumes.
Compute Fast and Prosper!
al@afs4dna.com
Have Bioinformatics, Will Travel.
Remember, to contact me for any reason, please send E-mail to:
al@afs4dna.com
New FAX: 919-321-0216
Remember to call Al when you would benefit from consulting assistance in HPC, computational biology, any sort of parallel computing, including
SIMD, FPGA-assisted or general bioinformatics.
You may retrieve some of my personal background information by clicking on the following selections:
For payment options using credit cards via PayPal, please click here .
