Brian Drawert

Leading the technology development of our geo-spatial virtual reality tours.

Contact work on Web Application Development, DevOps, and Server Administration

Team Lead and Project Manager for an international collaboration to develop software and algorithms to facilitate modeling and simulation which accelerate the pace of biological discovery. I lead, managed, and mentored a team of software engineers supporting multiple projects. I administrated servers and orchestrated containers for highly-available production and development environments. Utilizing GitHub, I reviewed code and pull requests, managed tickets with project boards, and utilize automated testing to produce consistent high-quality software releases. We built user engagement with conference presentations, workshops, and on youtube. Software and services supported by this project include: - StochSS - Software as a Service for modeling, simulation, inference and analysis of biochemical models. - GillesPy2 - Python 3 package for stochastic simulation of biochemical systems. - SpatialPy - Python 3 package for simulation of spatial deterministic/stochastic reaction-diffusion systems embedded in a particle based fluid dynamics 3D domain. - StochSSCompute - Compute delegation server, allows for one to run simulations on distributed cloud Brian Drawert - page 1computing resources (AWS). - StochSS Live! - Publicly available modeling and simulation service. Modeling building interface, compute workflows, notebook integration for analysis & visualization. http://live.stochss.org/ This work is funded by a National Institute of Health (NIH) grant, of which I am co-PI for (R01- EB014877-04A1) StochSS: A Next-Generation Toolkit for Simulation-Driven Biological Discovery. Extending our computational software suite to integrate data into the model building process, and quantify model behavior. Tasmanian Devil Conservation Strategies: Using our advanced modeling and simulation toolkit, we developed a computational epidemiological model of Tasmanian Devils Facial Tumor Disease. We use it to evaluate categories of potential intervention strategies (i.e. vaccination).

Research: I ran a research group in the area of computational science, primarily focused on the field of computational biology. We developed software and new methods to create and simulate computational models that further our understanding of complex biological systems. We also partnered with biologists, ecologists, neuroscientists, and medical doctors to used computational models coupled with experiments to accelerate the pace of scientific research. Projects: - StochSS: Building the next-generation toolkit for simulation-driven biological discovery. - Understanding neurodegenerative disease at the molecular and cellular level (cellular degeneration in ALS). - Understanding how a yeast cell can sense the direction of other yeast cells (polarization during mating). - Understanding systemic toxic shock in inhalation Anthrax infection (pathogen-macrophage dynamics). - Evaluating the best method to save endangered frogs from extinction (ecological epidemiology models). - Understanding how ant colonies can synchronize their activity cycles (ecological colony models). Teaching: I am passionate about ensuring student success, with a goal to make learning transformative in a way that empowers a lifetime productivity. Courses I taught included: Introduction to Programming, Introduction to Data Structures,Systems II: Operating Systems & Networking, Introduction to Cybersecurity. Service: Co-Founded WNC Broadband (wncbroadband.org), a community advocacy organization bridging the "Digital Divide". Unix Systems Administrator for the CSCI linux computer cluster, and Institutional Review Board (IRB) committee.

My research is in computational science, specifically computational systems biology and utilizing cloud computing as a platform for scientific inquiry. ◦ StochSS Stochastic Simulation-as-a-Service. Using the power of cloud computing to create an integrated platform for stochastic simulation. ◦ Yeast Polarization Modeling and simulation of the spatial stochastic biochemical dynamics intrinsic to the process of polarization during mating in S. cerevisiae. ◦ Yeast Cell Wall Modeling how the mechanical properties of the cell wall couple with the biochemical processes that drive the deformation during cellular polarization. ◦ Frog Conservation Modeling and simulation to find conservation methods for the endangered Sierra Mountain yellow-legged tree frogs Rana sierrae.

I was involved in the development of the cloud computing platform-as-a-service software AppScale, including development of the core components, a testing and validation framework, and process and team organization. I also provided professional services to a non-profit Novim to create a cloud platform for open pension calculation. The objective was to create a service to enable pension plan members and plan managers to analyze the plan costs and benefits tradeoffs, thus democratizing the ability to analyze and evaluate complex pension issues.

Algorithm development and mathematical modeling of stochastic systems in computational biology. The title of dissertation is "Spatial Stochastic Simulation of Biochemical Systems".