SWAN Project

Tim Clark is a researcher in biomedical informatics with over seventeen years of experience in the field. He is Director of Informatics at the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease; an Instructor in Neurology at Harvard Medical School; and a Senior Advisor and Core Member of the Harvard Initiative in Innovative Computing, where he served as Founding Director of Research Programs in 2006-2007. He is also a Founding Editorial Board member of the journal Briefings in Bioinformatics.

Before coming to Harvard, Tim was Vice President of Informatics at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, where his team built one of the first integrated bio- and chemi-informatics software platforms in the pharmaceutical industry. He began his career in life science informatics at the NCBI/NIH, where he led the database development team for NCBI GenBank.

Tim's core research group is based in the Neurology Research Department of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), where it works in the areas of neuroinformatics, semantic web, and social computing.

June Kinoshita is Co-Founder and Executive Editor of the Alzheimer Research Forum, a web-based scientific resource and online community for Alzheimer disease research. She is a member of the advisory council of the M.I.T.-Harvard Medical School program in Health, Science and Technology; serves on the scientific advisory boards of the Telemakus Biomarkers Project and Schizophrenia Research Forum; and is a founding board member of the Foundation for Alzheimer's and Cultural Memory.

June served on the editorial board of Scientific American magazine, where she specialized in the neurosciences. She was a consulting editor to Science, where she covered scientific research and biotechnology in Asia and produced special issues on Japan, China and the Asian "Tigers". As a freelance writer, Kinoshita has published articles in the New York Times Magazine, Discover, Allure, American Health, New York Times Book Review, Technology Review, Longevity and Newsweek. She was Science Consultant for "Discovering Women", produced by WGBH in Boston; Program Developer and Science Editor for "The Secret Life of the Brain", a five-part film on neuroscience co-produced by David Grubin Productions and WNET in New York City (2002); and Science Editor for "The Forgetting", a PBS film on Alzheimer's Disease (2004).

June graduated from Harvard University in 1980, where she majored in physics. She is the author of Gateway to Japan (Kodansha International, 1990, 1993, 1998) and was an advisor for Black Rain, a film about the Japanese yakuza directed by Ridley Scott.

Paolo Ciccarese is Instructor at the Harvard Medical School and Assistant in Neurology at the Mass General Hospital. He holds a M.S. in Computer Science and he started his career as freelance consultant in knowledge management software development. Soon after, Paolo received a PhD in Bioengineering and Bioinformatics from the University of Pavia, Italy, where he was also a teaching assistant for five years in courses on the subjects of artificial intelligence in medicine and object orientation programming. After completing his PhD, he became a research fellow in neurology at the Mass General Hospital/Harvard Medical School as well as a research fellow in medical informatics at the University of Pavia.

Paolo matured a eight year experience in formal representation of computerized clinical practice guidelines. He designed and co-developed a guideline based decision support system named Guide, which combines guideline decision support with the power of clinical workflow management systems. Guide has been implemented for patients suffering from heart failure and several types of cancers. He has been involved in the design and development of data/knowledge management systems for rare pathologies and, in particular, in the first architectural design of the Italian Network for Amyloidosys, which comprehends an electronic patient record shared across the hospitals belonging to the network.

Paolo co-developed the rdf visualizer Welkin for the SIMILE project and founded the JDPF (Java Data Processing Framework) project, a modular and extendable open source infrastructure for processing big quantities of eterogeneus data.

Marco Ocana is a senior Java, AJAX and semantic web software architect for bioinformatics applications, with eleven years bioinformatics and cheminformatics experience and almost twenty years total in software engineering.

In addition to leading SWAN architecture development he has led and participated in other significant projects at: Massachusetts General Hospital, Sention Pharmaceuticals, Biogen Idec Inc., and Millennium Pharmaceuticals.

Marco holds an MS in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Gwen Wong has been a working molecular biologist for over 20 years. She has over 9 years' experience in pharmaceutical drug discovery in neurodegenerative diseases, specializing in using transgenic mice for high-throughput in vivo testing of small molecules, proteins, RNAi, gene therapy, and stem cells for Alzheimer disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Gwen established a high-throughput in vivo pharmacology program for Alzheimer disease drug discovery at Schering-Plough, Kenilworth, New Jersey. This involved extensive in vivo compound screening including acute assays to measure efficacy in lambda- and beta-secretase inhibition of Abeta as well as toxicity analysis in chronically dosed mice for Alzheimer Disease drug discovery. She also directed in vivo pharmacology at a nonprofit independent research facility ASL Therapy Development Foundation in Cambridge MA. Gwen received her Ph.D. working with Elizabeth Lacy, co-discoverer of the microinjection technique to generate transgenic mice. With Bob Margolskee at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Roche Institute of Molecular Biology, Gwen generated mice that could not taste bitter substances using gene knockout techniques. Gwen has worked in the molecular biology fields of T cell immunology, taste reception, and neurodegeneration, and her first love in science is mouse molecular genetics and the application of mice in medicine.

Gwen is the curator of Drugs in Clinical Trials for Alzforum. She is also currently curating and writing research and drug development content in a project called Semantic Web Applications in Neuromedicine (SWAN) for Alzforum. It is a welcome and refreshing change to write about exciting science discoveries and developments and not worry about Materials and Methods sections, or to have to dose mice every 8 hours! When not thinking or writing about Alzheimer disease, Gwen is with her kids, her husband Mark Labow of Novartis Pharmaceuticals, in the garden or in the kitchen. Gwen loves to play squash and swim, and is an avid reader of everything.

Elizabeth Wu has been involved in the development with ARF since its inception. She is now the Knowledge Management Consultant for the site focusing upon the search, retrieval, and organization of the site's content. She is also responsible for creating and updating the search strategies behind the Papers of the Week, and for maintaining the genes, drugs, library, and research tools sections of the site.

She graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong majoring in Biology and Biochemistry. While pondering her future as a research scientist, she spent a couple of years working as a research assistant in the medical school there. Soon, she was drawn to the systems behind the organization and retrieval of scientific information and pursued her master's degree in library and information science at the University of Wisconsin. That marked the beginning of her career as a medical librarian specializing in technology applications.

Passionate about her continuous quest for improving scientific communication, Elizabeth pioneered the use of new technology in the organization and delivery of information and knowledge in the biomedical field. While working at the Harvard Medical School Library, she developed the Harvard Medical Web in early 1994. The web site served as a catalyst within the Harvard Medical community, and spawned a number of departmental and programmatic web sites, many of which she helped launch. These sites represent a wide range of innovative implementations such as clinical case studies, a brain image library, and electronic journals.

She feels fortunate to work with a dedicated, creative, and energetic team of professionals who share the same vision in improving scientific communication for the Alzheimer's disease research community. She believes much more could be done for the community and looks forward to developing new ideas for how the site might help achieve this goal.