About BioLogic Consulting

A Little History...

About BioLogic...

History...

Client List...

In 1997 I decided to leave research molecular biology. This was far from a simple decision, but a necessary one. Prior to that I had just spent 4 years of undergraduate, 5 1/2 years of graduate, and 3 1/2 years of postdoctoral study in the field of molecular biology. Up until that time, poverty was not particuarly important; after-all I was a student and supposed to be thankful for the opportunity to slave away to make some lab directory rich and famous. And for a while I enjoyed the research (which is the only reason anyone would tolerate those kinds of working conditions - very low pay, no benefits, and little or no chance for advancement). However, it dawned on me one day after yet another 2 week experiment had failed miserably, that rather than end up on the great "postdoc" cycle of continuously searching for a tenure-track position, I would instead to go find work using my other skill-set, namely software development (which I had been doing for each of the labs I worked for, and to aid my own research). Now to most this would seem a bit odd - a biologist writing software? How can those go together? As it turns out, very well indeed. I found that the fusion of my biology training and software development offered a unique view on the software development process, one which was appreciated by members of the development team (well, most of them anyway!). I applied the ideas I had learned in biology about critical thinking, clear focused writing, and complex system modeling to developing software programs, and found that my approach was not as common as I thought.

My first positon out of science was as a lead tester with Jones Cyber Solutions, a small start up company founded by Glen Jones from Jones Intercable. I began with a four month assignment to discover the reason why a component of the application was causing database deadlocks. My approach utilized my science training for observe/hypothosize/test and I was able to rapidly locate the source of the problems. This impressed lead of the architecture team, who asked if I would like to join the architecture group as a junior architect. I accepted and found that I both liked the work, and had an aptitude for the kind of "big-picture" thinking that is required. I found that the fusion of my biology training and software development offered a unique view on the software development process, one which was appreciated by members of the development team (well, most of them anyway!).

Skipping foward a bit...

BioLogic Software Consulting started out in 2002 as a sole-proprietorship owned by myself as the Principal Architect. At that time the company was founded with the idea of creating information systems for Biotechnology companies with a particular, emphasis on bioinformatics hence the company name and logo. However, as it turned out most biotechnology companies are not yet ready to "embrace" the best practices of information technology, and would rather spend money on the reasearch side of the shop. So instead I focused my attention on researching the best practices of software development, and in particular, the practice of system modeling. I found that for most software developers, the idea of a model ends with a few class diagrams and maybe a couple of sequence diagrams. I was very surprised by this, since modeling is critical to thinking about biology and the highly complex relationships that occur in a cell, and so I naturally start to break-down complex problems by forming models. Apparently, not everyone works this way, so I wrote a book to help others to understand how I view the Art of Modeling (go here for more information).