Swedlow Lab

Jason Swedlow earned a BA in Chemistry from Brandeis University in 1982. He performed his PhD in Biophysics with Profs D. A. Agard and J. W. Sedat, finishing in 1994. Dr Swedlow was a postdoctoral fellow with Dr T. J. Mitchison at UCSF and then Harvard Medical School from 1994 and 1998, supported by a Damon Runyon Walter Winchell Cancer Research Fund Fellowship from 1995 to 1997. In 1998, Dr Swedlow established his own laboratory at the Wellcome Trust Biocentre, University of Dundee, Scotland as a Principal Investigator and Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow. His lab focuses on studies of mitotic and interphase chromosome structure and dynamics. In 2002, Dr Swedlow was awarded a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship. He participates as Faculty in the Analytical and Quantitative Microscopy Course. He is co-founder of OME (along with Peter Sorger and Ilya Goldberg).

Chris Allan is a Canadian born software developer and systems administrator from Vancouver, British Columbia who joined the Swedlow lab in early 2003. His early contributions were the initial implementation of mass-storage infrastructure and network groundwork to support the University of Dundee's Light Microscopy Facility (LMF), but he now spends most of his time working on the OMERO.server project. Chris gained most of his systems administration and software development expertise as a Vancouver high-school student working in the commercial sector doing security, systems and network consulting for local companies and as a contractor/employee in the GT Trust high-security solutions team of GT Group Telecom Services (now a division of Bell Canada). His software interests lie in the fields of distributed computing, secure programming practices and encryption. When not with a head down in Java, C++ or Applied Cryptography he can be seen playing for Team Fife in Scottish Volleyball Division 2.

Colin Blackburn joined the OME project in late 2007 as a Python developer. Originally graduating in physics, and then computational physics, he has worked in psychology, physiology and astronomy as a developer of scientific software. When he finds the time he balances the sedentary nature of his obsession with cryptic crosswords with orienteering, fell running and the occasional mountain marathon.

Jean-Marie Burel joined the staff of the Swedlow lab in 2003. Since then, he's been contributing to the development of OME, and spends most of his time working on the OMERO.insight project. He received is PhD in mathematics from the University of Brest in 2000. His research interests lie in the area of harmonic maps, harmonic morphisms and geometric structure. After his PhD, he worked in a private company as developer then moved (September 2001) to Lund University, Sweden, where he held a post-doctoral research position. Jean-Marie now enjoys the muddy rugby pitches of Scotland.

Brian Loranger joined the Dundee team in early 2006 and is currently developing the various import tools used by OME. Originally an aeronautical engineering student, he migrated to software development in the early 90s, and has been programming ever since. He spent most of his early programming days working in the private sector, primarily in the telecommunications industry. When not working on OME, he enjoys cycling, hiking, and (when he can find a snow-covered slope) snowboarding.

Donald MacDonald started work as a developer on the OME project in January 2006. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Paisley. His research interests include Statistical Natural Language processing, Data Visualization and Image Classification specifically Remote Sensing images. Donald has worked as a developer for a number of companies and recently as lecturer in Computer Science before seeing the light and joining the OME group in early 2006.

Will Moore came to Dundee as a cell biologist to do his PhD and then joined Jason's lab as a post-doc in 2003. Having got interested in the OME project from a user's point of view, he decided on a change of scene and left the lab to do an MSc in Applied Computing at Dundee University's School of Computing. He returned to the Swedlow lab for his MSc project. His goal was to make it easier for biologists to record their experimental metadata in a digital form. This was the start of the OMERO.editor development, which continued when he joined the lab as a developer in October 2007. His other interests include mountaineering, sailing and motorbiking.

Andrew Patterson joined the OME project in 2007 to manage the data model and project documentation. As a software developer he has worked on games, e-learning and personal development applications. In his spare time his interests include historic reenactment and costuming. He has typeset and published an illustrated book on armour making. He would like a computer controlled sewing machine but has managed, so far, to resist temptation. He studied at the University of Dundee and the University of St Andrews and has lived in Fife since 1989.

Aleksandra Tarkowska joined the OME project in 2007 as a software developer. Before joining the team, she studied at the Universite d'Artois in France as UE Socrates-Erasmus student and the Technical University of Lodz where she received her Master degree in Computer Science, Engineer. Her specialisation is internet technologies. After graduation she has worked on e-learning, enterprise and personal development web applications in the commercial market. In a free time she relaxes her body and mind: riding a bike, windsurfing, skiing and mountaineering.

Funding

Development of OME in the Swedlow lab is supported by:

• The Wellcome Trust (Award Refs 068046 and 077128)
• The BBSRC (Grant Refs BB/D006589/1 and BB/D00151X/1)

Past OME Developers in the Swedlow Lab

Josh Moore — Josh has moved to work on OMERO for Glencoe Software.

Andrea Falconi joined the staff of the Swedlow lab in 2002. Since then, he's been contributing to the development of OME. Over the years, Andrea has consulted on large software projects and actively joined the development of several applications in different domains, ranging from earth-observation to medical and to business. Having had his brain irremediably damaged by mathematics, his main interests are now in formal software analysis and design as well as design patterns. Andrea now lives in South Africa, but keeps in touch, and may even read the CVS commits!

Stefan Frank has been doing software-development both in the academic and in the commercial field for nearly 10 years now. After graduating in Mathematics and Philosophy in the beautiful city of Bochum, he worked for companies like Springer, SAP, debis, DKFZ(German Cancer Research Center) and several dot-com ventures. His main interest lies in Software Architecture, where he tries to bring as much sound object-oriented principles into the application, as the current state of the J2EE-Specification allows. He is currently based in Heidelberg, Germany, where, if he is occasionally absent from his keyboard, the most probable place to find him is a basketball-court.