History with Qt


Pacific Health Research & Education Institute

Programmer / Analyst (Full-time) · Honolulu, Hawai'i · 12/2009 - 12/2011

Served as staff programmer on two NIH cancer studies (PLCO and NLST), developed custom data management, workflow and case management applications as well as many small scripts and programs for impromptu reporting and data analysis. I was laid off at the close of the studies (along with the rest of the staff) then re-hired a year later to work on the GRADE study.

  • Developed custom data management, workflow and case management applications as well as many small scripts and programs for impromptu reporting and data analysis which allowed me to provide critical study statics and reports at a moments notice.
  • Developed methods for dealing with some very complex logistical constraints imposed on the studies.

  • Added a feature to Ruby’s “gem” command to install gems from a directory. This was necessary since the study’s computers were not allowed to connect to the Internet (see source code here).

  • Saved the institute thousands of dollars in software and hardware purchases

  • Designed various workflow systems using Ruby on Rails and MySQL

  • Developed micro services in Ruby & Sinatra that could be used by various of these workflow systems and desktop applications

  • Developed desktop applications in Python and Qt.

  • Integrated web applications into a standard Windows desktop configuration for staff of over 50 research assistants.

  • Started my quest to understand the challenges involved with modeling healthcare, biological and other sparsely structured data.


Started as an MS Access database that helped to clean up duplicate and erroneous participant records. The system was later ported to MySQL and retained the MS Access UI, provided a new desktop UI and micro service that was used by other systems. A Ruby API and CLI tool was also created for quickly generating ad-hoc reports.