My start in programming came with a high school class in 1967. I have extensive formal training in several disciplines but I have always been drawn to the application of computers to expanding the possibilities of the businesses and projects that I have been involved with. The businesses have included several manufacturers of spectroscopic and chromatographic instrumentation, an agricultural research and consulting firm, and an academic laboratory.
My projects have included:
 | Designed and lead the development of application software for multi-input, CCD-equipped spectrometer systems to be used for emission and Raman spectroscopy. This software was hardware independent and used plug-in modules for computation and I/O. Its adaptability was demonstrated when it was easily extended to support a dual-spectrometer fluorescence instrument that had not been conceived when the software was designed. |
| Developed instrument interfaces for the Thermo My Instrumenttm specification. These interfaces included extensions that I developed for operating process control hardware. |
| Designed and lead the development of the application software for an FT/ICP product. The code for this software was approximately 1/8 as large as the code for another ICP product that had similar features. |
| Extended a commercial chromatography application to use a 128 channel array detector as an option to the standard single channel detector. The capabilities enabled by the multichannel detector were incorporated with minimal changes to the user interface. |
| Developed hardware interface layers for two systems that perform DNA mutation detection by chromatography. I also modified the databases used by these applications to accommodate multichannel detectors. |
| Developed embedded software for automatic tuning of the radiofrequency matching network of an ICP torchbox. |
| Modified embedded software to implement a high speed microstepping grating drive. |
| Implemented software for imaging optical emission from flames and plasmas, including instrument control and data acquisition, improved algorithms for evaluating the inverted Abel integral, and algorithms for plotting contour maps. |
| Built a high speed Infrared imaging spectrometer. I constructed the collection optics, interface electronics, and software. The instrument was used to measure the spatial distribution of emitting species in pyrotechnic flares. |
| Developed programs to perform statistical analysis of data. |
| Invented and tested improvements to the modified simplex algorithm for real-time optimization of the operating parameters of computer-controlled instrumentation. |
| Developed a linear programming application for least-cost feed formulation. The application included modeling features not available in other software packages. |
| Created an application to automate the reporting and billing of results from a commercial laboratory. |
| Wrote general ledger accounting software. |
| Developed a language similar to FORTH that was useful for programming a minicomputer with limited disk and RAM resources. |