Welcome to my little piece of the internet.
Researcher, Standards and Interoperability Specialist and Research Software engineer.
Researcher, Standards and Interoperability Specialist and Research Software engineer.
From Cape Town to Amsterdam I am currently a Data and Software Specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Technical Program Manager at the Holomicrobiome Institute. These two positions combine some of the major threads that weave through my work and career: computers, code, theory, models and standards.
My undergraduate studies were in "classic" protein biochemistry, genetics with a healthy extra dose of philosophy on the side. During my Honours and Masters degrees, both which I passed with distinction I specialised in metabolic control analysis with the indomitable Prof Jannie Hofmeyr and later the Triple-J group. During my MSc I also started working as a Technical Assistant for the Biochemistry Departments where I started developing my user support (Windows), network administration (Novel, Linux, Exim, Apache) and the joys of supporting "essential" research equipment that only ran on a specific version of DOS
At the end of the last millenium, and my MSc I ran into the problem that there was no simulation software that was capable of doing the type of analysis I wanted to continue doing and so my PhD started with the use of a brand new, relatively unknown language Python 2.0. But why teach yourself one language when you can do two? I also heard of this language called Java which had this cool thing called applets and this sounded like a solution to a problem the a colleague, Jacky Snoep needed solving. These efforts lead to the development of PySCeS and JWS Online, respectively the first generic systems biology simulator implemented in Python and one of the first interactive model repositories.