James Estill

Experience

• 

  Western Kentucky University

  Jan 1995 - Jan 1996

  Undergraduate Researcher, Population Genetics
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  University of Georgia

  Jan 2000 - Jan 2005

  Research Tech III, Plant Genome Mapping

  • Developed multiple informatics analysis resources related to genetic mapping and physical mapping of genomes including the BACMan physical mapping tool and the LabMan laboratory information management system• Conducted wet lab work and used my informatics tools in the analysis of hybridization data related to the physical mapping of more than 20 eukaryotic genomes

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  University of Georgia

  Jan 2006 - Jun 2013

  • Facilitated communication as a liaison between genome biologists and iPlant application programmers to support development of online tools for phylogeny informatics• Extended my DAWGPAWS genome analysis pipeline to include additional ab-initio annotation inputs and added support for epigenetic mapping of hypermethylated domains and RNA-Seq data integration• Engineered a highly-scalable topological database schema and developed interface tools to support a web application connected to a comprehensive database of all the gene phylogenies derived from over a million genes from over 1,000 plant transcriptomes mapped onto the species phylogeny relationships for these taxa Show less • Developed the DAWGPAWS genome annotation pipeline for the discovery of genes and transposable elements that combines ab-initio and homology-based evidences in a distributed high-performance cluster computing environment• Developed the RepMiner graph-theory-based molecular sequence clustering and classification toolset• Developed an informatics analysis pipeline for mapping hypomethylated domains in eukaryotic genomes• Applied my informatics tools to evolutionary analyses of the spatial distribution of transposable elements and the epigenetic landscape of cereal genomes Show less

  • Postdoctoral Research Associate, Plant Phylogenomics

    Dec 2010 - Jun 2013

  • Graduate Research Associate, Plant Comparative Genomics

    Jan 2006 - Dec 2010
• 

  University of Michigan, College of LS&A

  Jul 2013 - Aug 2014

  Business Systems Analyst Senior, Museum Informatics

  • Communicated with museum curators and researches in the College to help identify software technologies to best service current and emerging needs in museum informatics• Developed Tableau analyses interfaces to museum databases that leverage an integration with the R statistical programming language• Added support for schema.org microdata tags in web applications to increase interoperability and search engine optimization• Added support for geographically tagged metadata to an archival data store of digital assets• Engineered a flexible ontology-based SQL database schema to serve as universal data store for all museums within the College• Developed Tableau interfaces to an administrative data warehouse to facilitate trend analysis in performance of academic departments and sponsored research support Show less

• 

  Michigan Medicine

  Aug 2014 - Jun 2018

  Business Systems Analyst Lead, Research Data Integration

  • Piloted a knowledge-graph analysis of research IT customers that strategically informs IT service investments• Cataloged over 480 public and private datasets that are used by the Michigan Medicine research community• Created use case scenarios, user acceptance tests and system documentation for research data services• Synthesized simulated clinical data sets for testing the technical functionality of research data services• Developed KPIs and a BI dashboard to track success metrics for a Service Oriented Architecture • Implemented a data virtualization system that integrates heterogeneous sources into analytics ready data sets • Instantiated the HIPAA aligned infrastructure required for participation in a national clinical research network • Developed a data quality framework in Tableau and R to align U-M clinical data quality to national standards • Managed the work of student interns and temporary staff contributing to research integration projects Show less

• 

  University of Michigan Medical School

  Jun 2018 - now

  Systems Analysis Manager, Michigan Center for Translational Pathology

  • Manage operations of a high availability cancer genomics pipeline comprised of 40+ components in 7 languages• Created policies and procedures that align IT resources to CAP CLIA requirements for clinical genomics• Increased efficiency of research and clinical IT services with a projected 5 year savings of > $2,000,000 • Increased security by leading the alignment of systems to HIPAA requirements for protected health information• Increased utility of IT systems by tailoring cloud and on-premise servers to clinical research needs• Increased warranty for 1.5 PB of data services using a hybrid cloud architecture with 99.999999999% durability Show less