Seminar 4 – Say What You Mean…

George M. Garrity, interim CEO and CSO of NamesforLife, LLC, Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Michigan State University.

NamesforLife is a bioinformatics spin-off that was formed to commercialize proprietary terminology tracking and management technology developed at MSU. From 1996-2006 George served as Editor-in-Chief of Bergey’s Manual of Systematic Bacteriology and currently serves as vice-chairman of the Judicial Commission of the International Committee on Systematics of Prokaryotes.

He and his collaborators are the authors and curators of the baseline taxonomy of bacteria and archaea that have been incorporated into GenBank, the major sequence alignment tools and databases, and the major textbooks in microbiology.

He is the principal investigator on two DOE-funded projects that developed visualization tools and algorithms for detecting annotation errors/anomalies and improving sequence-based classifications and taxonomies. He is also co-investigator on the Ribosomal Database
Project (RDP).

Before arriving at MSU, George held a number of
positions of increasing responsibility at Merck & Co. He is a Fellow of the American Society for the Advancement of Science and the Society of
Industrial Microbiology.

Richard Kidd, Manager, Informatics, RSC Publishing Richard’s Informatics department links together production editing teams working closely with a publishing R&D team, which enabled the development and launch of Project Prospect – the first example of semantic enrichment applied to primary research literature.

Richard has worked on data delivery and production processes with the Royal Society of Chemistry for nearly 20 years, helping to evolve RSC Publishing’s suite of 20 highly-cited journals, around 50 books a year, several magazine titles and specialised databases.

Most of the 4 tonnes of the RSC Journals Archive (dating back to 1841) and eBook collection passed through his hands in both paper and digital forms, and he has spoken to at meetings of the ACS, XML UK and the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry.

Project Prospect won the 2007 ALPSP/Charlesworth Award for Publishing Innovation, and this has led to recent talks on promoting semantic enrichment in the scientific publishing process at AAP/PSP 2008, CrossRef Annual Meeting, Online Information and ACS Spring 2008.

Steve joined Collexis in early 2006 and is responsible for the management of the company’s three industry business units and the overall execution of Collexis Worldwide operations. Prior to Collexis, he worked at IBM in increasing roles of responsibility in Territory and Emerging Technology management and executive positions for the IBM sales and distribution organization.

In his early career Steve founded, ran and eventually sold International Telecommunications Distributors, acting as the Chairman and CEO. He has an MBA from The Pennsylvania State University and a Business Degree from Bucknell University. Steve currently serves on the Advisory Boards of the University of South Carolina Engineering and Computer Sciences School, the iAdvantage Software Company, and is a committee member for the United Way of the Midlands.

Stephen Rhind-Tutt is President of Alexander Street Press, an electronic publishing company in the humanities and social sciences. He has 18 years of experience in electronic publishing with a number of different companies. At SilverPlatter from 1989 to 1995, he held a variety of roles and was responsible for the development, sales, and management of more than 200 electronic products.

Until its sale to Proquest, Stephen was President of Chadwyck-Healey, Inc. where he developed and distributed more than 150 electronic products, including the world’s largest collection of primary texts in English and American Literature. Since 2000, Stephen has been President of Alexander Street Press based in Alexandria, Virginia.

He has spoken at a number of conferences including The Charleston Conference, AAUP, SSP, The Association for Documentary Editors, and more. Stephen has a B.A. from University College London and an M.B.A. from Boston University.

Jake Zarnegar was named Chief Technology Officer of Silverchair in early 2003.

Jake has led the development and deployment of a number of Silverchair’s major software platforms, including:

* Silverchair Content Manager (SCM)
* Silverchair Custom Editorial Management Application (SCEMA)
* Taggers Online Thesaurus and Editorial Manager (TOTEM)
* TagMaster
* Silverchair Learning Systems (SLS)

A pioneer in XML web services for health reference content management, Jake has spearheaded a family of technologies including the application of semantic metadata to clinical content, ontology management tools, an
online authoring platform for medical authors and editors, and an e-learning CMS/LMS platform.

He is a graduate of The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.