Neil Robertson

Research overview

I am a member of the McCarthy group, offering software development and data analysis support to the laboratory and bioinformatics teams.

I develop and support the Information Management system for the Diabetes Research Lab at OCDEM. In addition I provide software tools for researchers and help to maintain the team's informatics pipeline.

I work mainly with Java technologies coupled with relational databases, currently Oracle, and make extensive use of open source libraries. I have an interest in other programming languages, as well as structured data formats, such as XML. Where possible I employ sound software engineering practices, and emphasize testing, deployment and documentation.

Most of my development experience has been with server-side, distributed and web-oriented systems. A major part of my research has been biological data integration using relational databases and ontological annotations.

I have much experience with User Interface design and development; for previous projects I built rich graphical applications to facilitate navigation, interrogation and representation of large, complex datasets. In addition to research development, I have worked on various commercial projects both large and small.

Publication list

DiscoverySpace: an interactive data analysis application.Robertson N, Oveisi-Fordorei M, Zuyderduyn SD, Varhol RJ, Fjell C, Marra M, Jones S, Siddiqui A. Genome Biol. 2007;8(1):R6. PMID: 17210078

Research areas

Software design and engineering, Relational Database Systems, Data modelling, XML technologies, RDF and Semantic Web technologies, Distributed systems, Asynchronous programming, User Interface design, Graphical and Web interfaces