Actually, as of now, us is me – Wade Rogers. Here’s a brief background on my interests, and how Still Pond Cytomics came to be.
I’ve been interested in discovery of patterns in data for over 25 years. That interest first emerged while I was at DuPont, where colleagues and I invented a pattern discovery algorithm called “TupleWare” for finding patterns in gene and protein sequence data. These data are described using an ‘alphabet’ of letters (20 amino acids or 4 nucleotides). Later I went to Bristol-Myers Squibb and then to Cira Discovery Sciences where we broadened our interest to the discovery of patterns in arbitrary categorical data (in other words, not restricting the alphabet to amino acids or nucleotides).
While at Cira I was introduced to Jonni Moore, who taught me flow cytometry. This is when I learned that flow is (a) so very different from most other “omic” technologies, and (b) in dire need of computational tools to enable better/deeper/faster knowledge discovery from increasingly high-dimensional data.
I joined Penn in about 2007 as Adjunct Associate Professor and Director of Computational Biology and Research Informatics in Path Bioresource, Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. In that capacity I worked closely with people far more gifted than I am in software development, including Herb Holyst, Neisan Sabet and Chris Sarnowski. Herb and I developed and continue to support the Bioconductor package flowFP, which implements what we call ‘cytometric fingerprinting’. We’ve used CF (and other computational approaches) with collaborators at Penn including Emile Mohler, Jonni Moore, Mona Kumar, Nina Luning Prak, Dave Allman, Carl June and Jon Maltzman. To date, I remain Adjunct Faculty at Penn working closely with other faculty at Penn.
A few years ago we published a paper describing the discovery (using cytometric fingerprinting) of cell and extracellular vesicle subsets that were collectively informative with respect to the state of the vascular endothelium. This discovery eventually gave rise to the creation of a Penn UpStart company, CytoVas LLC. In July 2016 I resigned from Penn to join CytoVas full-time as its Chief Scientific Officer.
Recently I retired from CytoVas to do things like sailing my Caliber 35 LRC to Still Pond as frequently as possible (my favorite anchorage on the Chesapeake Bay eastern shore, and hence the name of the company!), woodworking and boatbuilding, travel and grandkids.
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Still Pond Cytomics LLC is my vehicle for remaining active in flow informatics by sharing with you my hard-won skill set via consulting and education.