Technical Biography of Nathan Goodman

November 2003

Dr. Nathan Goodman, a computer scientist by training, has been working in bioinformatics for more than a decade. He is presently a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington. During his first year at ISB, Dr. Goodman also served as an Affiliate Professor of Bioinformatics at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks where he helped establish a bioinformatics research program.

Previously, he was a founding member of the Whitehead Institute / MIT Center for Genome Research, one of the nation’s first and most illustrious genome centers, and ran the center’s bioinformatics group from 1991-1996. He subsequently ran his own bioinformatics research group at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine where he worked on information systems for large scale biological laboratories and mining of large biological datasets. He has also worked in the bioinformatics industry, heading a technical marketing group at Compaq Computer Corporation focused on bioinformatics applications in the pharmaceutical industry, and serving as a bioinformatics consultant.

Outside of life sciences, Dr. Goodman has more than twenty-five years experience in computer industry and academia. He was Chief Computer Scientist and founder of Kendall Square Research Corporation, a manufacturer of multiprocessor supercomputers for transaction processing and scientific applications. He was a professor of computer science at Harvard University and Boston University. He spent many years at Computer Corporation of America working on distributed and object oriented database systems. He worked at Encore Computer Corporation and Sequoia Systems, Inc., two start-up companies that developed shared memory multi-processor computers. He was President of Marble Associates, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in object-oriented, client/server business information systems, Senior Vice President of Codd and Date, a leading consulting firm in the relational database field, and also worked as an independent consultant specializing in object oriented, distributed, and multiprocessor databases. Early in his career, in the laboratory of Prof. Seymour Papert at MIT, he was a member of the team that developed the LOGO computer language for children.

Dr. Goodman writes the It Guy column for Genome Technology magazine and has authored more than 80 technical articles and 25 abstracts on bioinformatics, database management, and advanced information systems. He is coauthor of the textbook, Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems.

Nathan Goodman received the Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1972, the Master of Science degree in Computer Science from MIT in 1976, and the PhD in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in 1980. Dr. Goodman's Ph.D. thesis, Power of Semijoins in Distributed Database Query Processing, studies practical and theoretical aspects of query optimization for distributed, relational database systems.