Leadership

VAST Scientific principals and staff are the basis of our business. Confident and enthusiastic leadership are the cornerstones to collaborative success with our customers and partners. Our professional staff consists of Ph.D. level scientists with expertise in biology, biochemistry, bioinformatics, other related fields, and of high level computer scientists and software engineers with extensive knowledge and experience in building and optimizing applications for life sciences.

VAST Scientific Principals

Michael Athanas, Ph.D. – Michael.Athanas@VASTSci.com – 508.259.1939

Athanas’ unique application of the intersection of his skills and experience as a scientist, data analyst, software architect, developer, IT architect, and project & team manager has provided measurable benefit to many leading life science companies. At VAST, Athanas builds and extends his success as founding partner and President of The BioTeam at building a highly reputable, responsive, and professional team of industry experts. Athanas has an extended history of bringing successful software products to market including BioTeam’s iNquiry, Blackstone's SmartCache, and ThermoFisher Scientific’s SIEVE. For Prior to the BioTeam, Athanas was Director of Scientific Consulting at Blackstone Computing, Athanas led a highly reputable team of scientists and developers focused upon enabling large-scale vendor neutral scientific computing solutions. He is the inventor (patent pending) of unique scalable data balancing algorithms that have provided core IP to Blackstone software products. As a Bioinformaticist at Cereon Genomics he collaborated in the transcriptional profiling team as well as created software infrastructures for high-throughput analysis including a scalable workflow engine based upon mobile agent technologies. Previous to Cereon, Athanas was a Research Scientist at Cornell University’s Wilson Synchrotron Laboratory exploring four-quark bound states produced in photon-photon interactions. At Cornell, he was Co-Architect of the Nile Project, a National Science Foundation project addressing large-scale databases and distributed computing in experimental elementary particle physics. Athanas received his Doctorate in Physics at the Mellon College of Science at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh.

Michael Griffin, Ph.D. – Michael.Griffin@VASTSci.com – 617.448.5090

As a computational scientist and entrepreneur for 20 years Griffin has made important contributions in a diverse set of disciplines. His novel stock trading algorithm based on the quantification of information flow is currently being used by a large investment management company on Wall St. He recently designed and developed a scalable mass spectrometry peak detection platform for a Harvard Medical School laboratory. As co-founder of Xpogen, Inc., he conceptualized and managed the development of a web-based research platform for functional genomics discovery based on a graph theoretic approach to analyzing gene expression data. For his doctoral research Griffin developed a supercomputer-based platform for predicting the maneuvering characteristics of near-surface submarines. Using high performance software he developed while working at a U.S. Navy research laboratory, Griffin redesigned an appendage with dramatically improved performance for a fleet of destroyers. Griffin has a doctorate in computational fluid dynamics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

VAST Scientific Advisory Board

Michael Fahy

For over 20 years Fahy has served in various roles in sales, sales management and operations management within the high technology product and professional services sector. Within the last 7 years, Fahy has held various senior executive positions for drug discovery informatics and computational infrastructure firms including Xpogen, Inc. and The Blackstone Technology Group, Inc.  Prior to that Fahy served 10 years at Uniform Information Services, Inc. where, as Vice President of Sales, he helped to transform the company's product and sales strategy away from traditional models of delivery over to Internet-based solutions and services.  Fahy is a graduate of The University of Buffalo with a B.S in Mechanical Engineering. 

Gaël McGill, Ph.D. 

McGill is currently CEO of Digizyme, Inc. a firm dedicated to the visualization and communication of science through advanced technology applications. Gael is also a visiting lecturer at Harvard Medical School.  McGill has served as a scientific and communications consultant for the Boston Scientific Corporation and remains a Technical Review Board member there. He has also served as Director of Product Development & New Technologies at Xpogen, Inc., an enterprise bioinformatics software company, and a director of the Harvard Biotechnology Club where he has organized seminar series on issues of science and entrepreneurship in biotechnology. After working at Dupont-Merck Pharmaceuticals and INSERM/Cochin Hospital in Paris, he completed his PhD at Harvard Medical School in the Division of Medical Sciences (Biochemistry & Molecular Pharmacology). His research on the mechanisms of tumor cell death/apoptosis was supported by the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Sandoz Pharmaceuticals fellowships, and resulted in numerous peer-reviewed publications (including the cover of Cell, and highlighted by BBC media & other news organizations). McGill received his B.A. summa cum laude in Biology, Music, and Art History from Swarthmore College.

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