overview | mission statement | location | PBiC-BMIF relationship | team

John Quigley, Systems Architect

1317 Blockley Hall
215-746-5146

John Quigley received his bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Rhodes College and is completing his Master of Science in Computer Science at Villanova University. He has extensive systems administration and programming experience as a result of eight years in industry. Mr. Quigley guides the data center infrastructure of the BMIF and assists investigators in identifying ways to utilize the facility's expertise to achieve their research goals. He works closely with David Birtwell and Nate DiGiorgio in managing the operations of the facility and the implementation of secure data resources and analysis tools. He oversees all servers, firewalls, and networking equipment per HIPAA and IRB security and privacy requirements and he develops the backup, archiving, and disaster/recovery procedures that ensure access to these resources. Mr. Quigley also serves as a Project Manager on various projects and has experience with information retrieval and text mining techniques, which he is currently using to design a search engine that will unite two separate clinical corpora for the Departments of Pathology and Radiology. John has been involved with virtually all BMIF projects, including caBIG, TTURC, CPHHD, LDI, PCOS and Leukemia.

Nathanael S. DiGiorgio, Systems Administrator

1317 Blockley Hall
215-746-5146

Nate DiGiorgio has extensive systems administration, database administration and programming experience as a result of six years in industry. In addition to maintaining servers, disk storage, databases and firewalls, Mr. DiGiorgio relies on his varied experience to fill skill gaps in projects. He and John Quigley created and maintain the data management resources that researchers rely on when applying for grant funding. Nate has also played a major role in implementing Penn's adoption of the caTISSUE Suite and caTIES application, which allow researchers access to previously unused tissue samples dating back decades. Mr. DiGiorgio works with all members of the BMIF to provide consultation on a wide range of issues related to web applications and databases. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Drexel University.

David Birtwell, Programmer Analyst

1317 Blockley Hall
215-746-8679

David Birtwell received his bachelor's degree in Computer Science degree from Drexel University and is completing his Master's degree in Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He has worked in the bioinformatics domain for almost ten years. Mr. Birtwell guides the software development at the BMIF, choosing technologies, development practices, and building the core modules that form the BMIF software infrastructure. He identifies new areas for potential novel software development and works with other BMIF team members to create re-usable software tools that have application across broad areas of research in the School of Medicine. He works closely with John Quigley and Nate DiGiorgio to create the development environment at the BMIF and has written the core software security and authentication modules that ensure HIPAA compliance of all BMIF hosted applications.

David has participated in numerous BMIF projects including PCOS, CPHHD, TTURC, EPHRA, and the Penn Heart Failure Study. He has participated in the caBIG Strategic Planning workspace and assisted other BMIF team members in the adoption of several caBIG applications. He has developed a generic case report form data management system that has been applied to several BMIF projects within the University of Pennsylvania and will likely be used by researchers outside of Penn.

Kevin Lux, Programmer Analyst

1426 Blockley Hall
215-746-1770

Kevin received his bachelor's in Computer Science from Drexel University and just recently completed his Master's in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania. He has also obtained the MCSD (solution developer) for .Net, MCSE:S (systems engineer, security specialization) for Windows Server 2003 and CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) credentials. His primary areas of work experience relate to the design/development of practical and theoretical information security systems, web applications and data workflows. Kevin's primary responsibility will be to create applications to support research. He is also involved with any project that needs automated or manual access to lab results from the hospital.

David Wang, Database Administrator

1426 Blockley Hall

David Wang received his bachelor's degree in Information Science and Technology from Drexel University and has worked in the pharmaceutical industry for five years. Mr. Wang designs and modifies databases to integrate data from numerous sources in support of investigator-initiated projects. Duties include consultations with users to determine the data required and how it will be used, and the user interfaces needed to allow querying and retrieval of data. He also assists cancer researchers develop querying strategies and SQL programming. A key role for Mr. Wang is working as a part of a team to develop novel data management system and methods for data integration.

Tara McSherry, Data Analyst

1426 Blockley Hall
215-746-1775

Tara McSherry received her Master's degree in Information Systems from Drexel University. She comes to the BMIF with database design experience from working in industry. Tara's responsibilities as a data analyst include conceptual and physical data modeling and implementation of data models using Oracle tools. Since joining the BMIF, Tara has gone from performing typical data analyst tasks to focusing on project leadership. Tara has been Penn's project manager for all caBIG Tissue Banking and Pathology Tools Workspace projects - caTIES Phase I, caTISSUE Core Phase 1, The Paraffin Embedded Tissue Archive, caTIES Phase II, caTISSUE Core Phase 1b, and The Tissue Banking and Pathology Tools Suite.

Tara's responsibilities include developing work plans, assigning personnel, coordinating daily activities, monitoring progress and assisting staff by providing leadership when needed. In addition to her project management tasks, Tara has been fully involved in all requirements gathering, testing, quality assurance and training activities for the caBIG TBPT projects at Penn. Tara has created training tutorials and videos as well as end user manuals. She has demonstrated tools and provided project overviews and training sessions for Penn users and users throughout the caBIG community.

Craig R. Street, M. Biot, Biomedical Informatics Scientist

1426 Blockley Hall
215-746-8686

Mr. Street received his master's degree in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics from the University of Pennsylvania. Craig serves as the project leader for several biomedical informatics projects, interacting with researchers and IT professionals to achieve research project goals. He also has primary responsibility for providing bioinformatics and biomedical informatics data analysis through consultation and training. In addition, he oversees the design of biomedical informatics-related technical training courses, workshops, and e-learning, and provides computer and data analysis training for researchers using facility resources.

Vishal Nayak, Biomedical Informatics Specialist

1426 Blockley Hall
215-746-1776

Vishal received his Masters degree in Information Systems from Drexel University, Philadelphia in April 2004. In addition, he has worked as a bioinformatician for a molecular biologist for 2 years, as a software engineer for a telecommunications firm for a year and holds a bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering. His responsibilities include providing biomedical informatics and computer support to users of the Biomedical Informatics Facility. This includes providing support and working with the biomedical informatics team on large computational projects such as the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid. Additional duties include designing and instructing training workshops related to tools offered by the Facility, assisting users with data analysis for genomics and proteomics applications and programming.

Wallace P. Wormley III, Senior Data Analyst

1227 Penn Tower
215-662-6872

Wallace has a degree in engineering from Drexel University and a certificate in software engineering. Wally has worked previously for a major CRO and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine - Office of Human Research. He has a wide-ranging experience in software development for web-based applications and website development. He also has extensive experience in clinical database design, creation and data standards, systems validation, and data management. His duties in the past have been implementation and oversight of a web-based study and data management tools, and building and implementing custom web-based application to facilitate clinical research. Wally's duties include custom applications for clinical research and clinical trials management systems.

Former Colleagues

David Fenstermacher, PhD, Director

1318 Blockley Hall
215-746-8680

Dr. Fenstermacher is Director and Founder of the Biomedical Informatics Facility of the Abramson Cancer Center and is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. Dr. Fenstermacher has directed the development of bioinformatics distributed computing systems to support educational and research ventures, including multiple institutional projects. He has also designed systems for more specialized projects requiring data integration of clinical, genomics, and proteomics data to support projects focused on modifier gene and biomarker discovery. The Biomedical Informatics Facility is working to develop a computational infrastructure that will support translational cancer research through projects such as caBIG™ (Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid) while also providing bioinformatics and biomedical services for individual researchers.

Prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Fenstermacher was Director and Founder of the UNC-CH Center for BioInformatics and spent thirteen years as a molecular biologist/geneticist in both academia and industry.

Megan Helfrick, Business Administrator

1426 Blockley Hall
215-746-1764

Megan received her bachelor's degree in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania and has worked at Penn in finance and administration for the past ten years. Her primary responsibility is to manage the grants and contracts for the group. In addition, Megan also provides administrative support to the Director and members of the informatics team.

Casey Overby, Biomedical Informatics Technician

1426 Blockley Hall
215-746-1781

Casey received her BS in Bioinformatics (ICP) at University of Michigan and recently completed her Masters in Biotechnology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her responsibilities include providing technical support for Biomedical Informatics Facility projects and interacting with researchers and IT professionals throughout the Abramsom Cancer Center and the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. Additional duties include assisting with programming projects as required, and assisting users with data analysis for genomics and proteomics applications and programming.

Zhe Zhang, Graduate Student

Zhe Zhang is a visiting student and a research assistant of BMIF. He got his B.S. of biochemistry from Fudan University, China, and M.S. of cell and molecular biology from Texas Tech University. Zhe is also pursuing his Ph.D. degree in biomedical informatics from Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His research field is about application of microarray technology to clinical practice, which involves the meta-analysis of microarray data. He is currently working on his dissertation and project MAMA (Meta-Analysis of MicroArray data), a software platform supporting simultaneously analysis of multiple microarray datasets.