Hilmar Lapp

My research interests are in reusable and interoperable software and data, large-scale data integration, and in building open, sustainable eScience infrastructure. While a biologist by training, I have been programming for almost three decades, from building commercial applications to writing real-time data acquisition software, to developing bioinformatics data integration systems and standards.

In my role at NESCent, I am involved with and have helped initiate many of the Center’s cyberinfrastructure initiatives aimed at grass-roots building of community capacity. I brought the hackathon program and Google Summer of Code participation to the Center. I also serve in senior roles in the NSF-funded Phenoscape project (http://phenoscape.org) on ontological annotation of evolutionary phenotype observations, as well as the Dryad digital repository for data supporting scientific publications (http://datadryad.org). Before joining NESCent, I worked for almost 10 years in functional genome informatics in the biopharmaceutical sector, where among other things I built SymAtlas, one of the first decidedly gene-centric database integrating genome annotation databases with gene function data.

I have also been been a long-time advocate of open-source and open development of software. Software I write is free for everyone to reuse, modify, and redistribute. I am convinced that the Future of Science is Open, including the open sharing and reuse of all scholarly inputs and outputs, and that the scholarly communication process works best for science if conducted as openly as possible. I aspire to practice this conduct whenever I can, including publishing in open-access journals, and signing my peer reviews, whether positive or negative.