March 10, 2003
Business model: The BioTeam is a bio-IT consulting firm with expertise in life sciences and IT that was started roughly one year ago by four former Blackstone Computing colleagues.
Philosophy: Act as a SWAT team: work fast, keep overhead low (no offices), steer clear of lengthy data integration projects.
Core services: Design and implement IT infrastructure with focus on cluster/grid computing; assist with application development and integration; aggressively use open-source software if appropriate.
Founders:
Michael Athanas — Ph.D., physics, Carnegie Mellon; conducted quark research at Cornell University; co-architect of NSF-funded Nile project (large distributed computing environment).
Chris Dagdigian — B.S., biotechnology, Worcester Polytechnic Institute; a founder of BioPerl Project.
Bill Van Etten — Ph.D., genetics, Indiana University; conducted rat genetic research and worked in bioinformatics at Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research.
Stan Gloss — Trained as respiratory therapist but switched to sales and business development.
Sample of clients: Texas A&M University; Harvard University Bauer Center for Genomic Research; Wyeth Research.
Sample of ongoing projects: Beyond Genomics (IT infrastructure and application development); UC Berkeley/Harvard (transfer of Flybase to Harvard); Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory, Singapore (deploy 150-CPU Xserve cluster).
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