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| Peter Gates, Johnson & Johnson PR&D |
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Peter Gates received his Ph.D. in Physiology and Biophysics at Rush University in Chicago in 1989 and did a post-doc at the Mayo Foundation studying the electrophysiology of ocular epithelia. He spent four years working for Sterling Winthrop Pharmaceutical Research Division in the scientific computing department. He subsequently spent four years working as an independent contractor in both large and small companies including Rhone-Poulenc Rorer, SmithKline Beecham and Affymetrix. In 1998 Peter went on to work for Emax Solution Partners where he was responsible for designing, implementing and deploying enterprise software used to manage commercial and proprietary chemical assets for pharmaceutical research organizations. At Emax Peter interacted with customers in Bristol-Myers Squibb, Schering Plough, Chiron and Roche. Two years later, as the .com bubble was bursting Peter took a position with 3-Dimensional Pharmaceuticals Inc. managing database technology for the biotech startup. Three years later Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development L.L.C. acquired 3-Dimensional Pharmaceuticals. Peter currently is responsible for database efforts in support of both the Advanced Biological and Chemical Discovery (ABCD) program and the J&J PRD Spring House Research Site.
He currently resides in his residence of 15 years in Collegeville Pennsylvania with his wife and two daughters. He spends his time off gardening and riding his road bike in the hills of southeastern Pennsylvania.
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A Framework for Research Informatics
Peter Gates, Johnson & Johnson PR&D
We consider the question “What is research informatics?” We assert that the conceptual invariant across all research informatics is the scientific method. We define the scientific method as the interplay between observation and model construction. We take the position that model construction is generally not amenable to software automation. This we claim lies on the human side of the human-computer boundary. With that in mind we consider the following sequence of steps:
1. The mining of existing data
2. The planning of experiments
3. The execution of experiments
4. The reduction of observations to data
We propose the automation of these activities to be the program of research informatics. We focus on steps 2 though 4 and consider two specific strategies. The first is the use of partial evaluation of a function (f(b,x) = fb(x)) as a conceptual framework for combining convenience with flexibility in software. The second is the use of transitive closure (e.g. a->b and b->c => a->c) together with recursion as a convenient way of generating rich structures from a small set of simple building blocks. This last concept has been described as a free construction in the mathematics literature. These ideas will be illustrated with a design pattern for managing mixtures associated with biological assays used in pharmaceutical research.
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