In December, Martin Fox has joined our team as a BioMedIT Project Manager and he is a perfect fit for a number of reasons. With over 20 years of project management experience, Martin brings a wealth of knowledge in infrastructure design and engineering, including urban and river transport, as well as hydroelectric power plants. Originally from Tasmania, he worked in Australia, Pakistan, India and China as well other countries in the Pacific, Asia and Africa.
For the past 4 years Martin worked at the ETH Zurich Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE) as a service desk leader and coordinator, providing IT consulting advice on computing solutions for research purposes. He also managed topical projects such as roll-outs of operating systems and new equipment, configuration of Ubuntu Linux servers and workstations, upgrade of the Department’s Puppet configuration management system for the Linux and Solaris environment, and he was involved in supporting VMware infrastructure.
Martin will be working very closely with the experienced and knowledgeable IT and security specialists involved in BioMedIT, defining and managing implementation milestones within each project workstream, as well as monitoring the progress to ensure that the milestones are achieved.
The overall purpose of the BioMedIT project is to establish a coordinated nationwide network of secure infrastructures to support computational biomedical research and clinical bioinformatics. Built on the existing centers of expertise at partner universities (regional nodes), this project is under the responsibility of the SIB Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics.
In parallel, the BioMed IT Interoperability Working Group, chaired by Kevin Sayers, continues to develop and implement mechanisms for interoperable multi-site computing capabilities within SPHN, including data and analysis workflows. Heinz Stockinger chairs the SIB IT Security Working Group, that advises on IT infrastructure (storage and HPC) and practical IT security measures for the BioMedIT nodes, mitigating security risks through monitoring, training and awareness.
Energetic and dedicated, Martin will inject new and creative ideas and enhance the progress of the BioMedIT project, helping to advance personalized health research in Switzerland.