Dan Blankenberg
Daniel Blankenberg is a faculty member in the Genomic Medicine Institute at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute. Dan's lab utilizes high-throughput omics technologies, such as next generation sequencing, and data-intensive computing to explore biomedical research questions.
Prior to moving to Cleveland Clinic, Dan was a researcher in the Nekrutenko lab at Penn State, working primarily on the Galaxy project, where he was responsible for the architecting and actual coding of many of Galaxy’s key components. Dan has been working on Galaxy since its inception, even playing a role in the development of the now defunct Perl-based application described in Giardine, et al 2005. Learning a great deal from this early attempt, his focus remains on enabling accessible, reproducible and transparent research through the development of a generic framework, with a developmental goal of supporting the life sciences. Dan remains the longest running Galaxy core developer.
Shortly after the release of the original Galaxy application, Dan continued to be involved in the work on the Python-based version, appearing in 2005, that has become the Galaxy familiar to many researchers across the globe. These early efforts, which focused on the development of the Tool integration framework and tool development, resulted in the first publications describing the modern Galaxy application and framework (Blankenberg et al 2007 and Taylor et al 2007).
Through 2008, Dan was a crucial member of the still-small Galaxy development team. During these intense early years, Galaxy grew to become the powerful framework and public service that it is today. He is still amazed by the amount and quality of code that emerged during this critical period from such a small team at Penn State; much of this code remains in use today. At this time, Galaxy experienced an explosion in adoption and use by members of the worldwide scientific community. This widespread adoption enabled the Galaxy Team to expand outside of Penn State to Emory University and beyond. The highly talented Galaxy team continues to produce an innovative product with increasing contributions from the open source community.
In addition to continuing to play a leading role in the architecture and implementation of the Galaxy Framework, Dan has designed or integrated a large proportion of the tools and tool suites that are available with Galaxy out-of-the-box.
Dan is the architect and developer of the following features and components of the Galaxy Framework:
- Datatypes and metadata
- External Display Applications
- External Services
- Automatic format conversion
- Backend for Data sharing and non-duplication
Working closely with other members of the Galaxy team, Dan has played a significant role in the architecture and development of the following components:
- Analysis Interface and Tool components
- Data source integration
- Sample Tracking
- Data Libraries
- API
- Workflows
- Test Framework
- Dataset cleanup and maintenance
Contact
Email: [blanked2 AT ccf.org](mailto:blanked2 AT ccf.org)