erik.garrison@gmail.com
(502) 382-6005
265 Elm Street Apt. 3
Somerville, MA 02144
Spanish language citation. GPA: 3.45 overall. Varsity Crew 2002 to 2005. Undergraduate Fellow, Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Senior thesis focused on the relationship between social structure and communication technologies. Electives focused in computer science and statistics with classes in functional programming, theoretical computer science, peer-to-peer networks, linear algebra.
Research associate. Implemented of general framework for small variant detection from short-read sequencing data, freebayes. Collaborated with the NCBI to implement a genetic variant detection processing pipeline. Developed tools to manipulate short read sequencing data, insertion and deletion realignment and detection.
Contracted technical operations programmer and designer. Programmed Python-based control and monitoring systems subsequently by the company to manage more than a hundred virtual servers deployed in the Amazon EC2 cloud. Dramatically reduced the company's EC2 operating costs by encouraging the shutdown of unused servers.
Generalist software engineer. Worked on operating system build processes, software-related customer support issues, bug fixes, software design planning, communication among a dispersed group of volunteers, and system performance issues. Daily use of Python, Shell, and C for feature implementation and bugfixing in all layers of OLPC's open source the software stack.
Designed, wrote, and tested data acquisition and system control software for the "Polonator" gene sequencing device, still the only open source gene sequencer in existence. Wrote low level systems in C and C++, wrote high-level control and integration using Python, and used Perl and R for data processing and visualization. Worked with lab members to test and improve hardware systems within the device. Reconstructed a data processing pipeline to provide secondary validation of the results of "Accurate Multiplex Polony Sequencing of an Evolved Bacterial Genome" (Science, 2005).
Research Assistant. Wrote fast parsing software in C for processing Wikipedia's XML-based data dumps, and researched potential statistical metrics of user contribution. In a separate project, built a system (in Lisp) for analyzing data related to the internationalization of clinical trials.
Research Assistant to Alberto Abadie. Obtained and processed data for country-level quantitative studies of terrorism and violent extremism. This work required extensive use of R (for stats) and Python (for web crawling).
Web programmer and designer. Practical experience with early generation web technology, HTML, CSS, and supporting technologies.
C++, Python, Perl, Javascript, C, Lisp, R, *nix Shell scripting, Ruby.
MySQL and Postgresql on several jobs as data storage systems for complex processing tasks.
HTML, CSS.
5 years experience with Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and Gentoo).
R, Matlab, and Stata.
Native English. Fluent Spanish.