Mr. Pearson has extensive experience with management of large datasets and is part of the NIH Neuroscience Microarray Consortium team. Mr. Pearson managed the development of the Microarray Enterprise Manager (MEM) portal software used by the Consortium to manage data and work flow. MEM provides sample tracking, annotation of samples to MIAME (Minimum Information about a Microarray Experiment) standards, project costing and billing information as well as the facility to export the raw and processed data to NCBI¹s public Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) repository. Data for over 1400 samples has been transferred from MEM into GEO. The MEM system has subsequently been released under an Open Source license and the code is being hosted on the SourceForge site at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mem-5am.

Mr. Pearson created the first version of GenePool, a software program for analyzing and interpreting the results of high-density SNP genotyping microarray chips run using pooled genomic DNA. To date this software has been used to identify genes associated with Diabetes, Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, and memory performance in humans and has resulted in publications in Science, the American Journal of Human Genetics, and Diabetes. GenePool is free for academic and non-profit use but must be licensed for commercial use and it has already been licensed by a number of private entities including a top-5 international pharmaceutical company. Ongoing development of GenePool is supported by an NIH grant from the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) as part of the ENDGAME (Enhancing Development of Genome-wide Association Methods) Consortium. GenePool is available for download at: http://genepool.tgen.org.

Other software created by Mr. Pearson includes:

BioParser is a collection of perl modules and scripts that provide parsing and object-interfaces for common Bioinformatics text databases. http://bioinformatics.tgen.org/brunit/software/bioparser/

TGen-EUtils is a collection of perl scripts and modules that provides an object-oriented interface to the NCBI Entrez Programming Utilities (eUtils). http://bioinformatics.tgen.org/brunit/software/tgen-eutils/

TGen-POD2HTML is a collection of perl scripts and modules that provide a system for generating deployment-ready webpages from the POD documentation found in perl scripts and modules. http://bioinformatics.tgen.org/brunit/software/tgen-pod2html/

Mr. Pearson completed his undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at the University of Queensland and has postgraduate qualifications in Physiology and Pharmacology; Computer Science; and Engineering and Technology Management from the Queensland University of Technology and the University of Queensland. Before joining TGen, he was the Lead Programmer in the Bioinformatics and Scientific Programming Core (BSPC) at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in Bethesda, Maryland. Prior to working at the National Institutes of Health, he was Computer Systems Manager for the Genetic Epidemiology Laboratory at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research (QIMR) in Brisbane Australia.