Testimonials

“I had not considered using Excel as a user interface for the Iconix LIMS system, but with the right perspective, skill set and experience, it became an obvious choice. Paul showed me the power and flexibility of using Excel as a framework for building interactive UI’s. After having Paul work on several Excel-GUI projects, I’d recommend Excel as a technology of choice, and Paul as the technologist.

One notable project was a physical inventory reorganization effort at the Iconix laboratories. We had a collection of nearly 2 million tissue samples in over 20 freezers. We were estimating it to take over 10 weeks of laboratory technician time to go through all of the freezers, collect the samples we intended to keep, and store those away.

Paul took my simple request for a data support system, intended to collect inventory and location information, and turned it into a project facilitation package. In a matter of days, he prototyped a system that presented virtual freezer boxes to our technicians, quickly guiding them towards samples to save, and rigorously saving their new locations. The user interface was simple, but elegant, and thanks to Paul’s analysis of the project, it not only fit the requirements, but facilitated the laboratory work and reduced errors. Thanks to Paul’s application, we finished the project in 1/3rd of the time we planned. The laboratory technicians were happy because it made their job easier, and I was happy because we have a reliable Oracle database containing all of the new sample locations.

This was a perfect example of a laboratory process support application that had real, tangible economic benefits.”

Alan Roter
VP of Informatics, at Entelos, Inc

“Paul created an exceptional Excel program for us that solved our problem of extracting and graphing data from our LIMS system for FDA audits while maintaining data integrity and without requiring coding of reports using the LIMS’s proprietary report generator. I especially appreciate that he was willing to listen to our input on the structure of the data retrieval parameters and that he worked closely with the users to refine the program so it not only worked well, but was user-friendly.”

Carole Genovesi
Senior Manager, Environmental QC at Genentech, Inc

“Paul’s wizardry with Excel greatly increased our group’s productivity. He rapidly built tools ranging from a graphical database interface for tracking biological samples, to a simple pivot-table macro that saved hours of labor in the first week. His efficient and highly useable Excel applications saved our organization a huge amount of time that would otherwise have been spent in repetitious, error prone labor, or in developing less effective solutions in other programming languages.”

Jeremy Gollub
Senior Bioinformatics Scientist at Iconix Biosciences, Inc.

“Paul did an amazing job at producing very user-friendly Microsoft Excel applications in a very short amount of time. He developed several computational tools that performed complicated calculations and very conveniently summarized and visualized trends in very large sets of biological assay data. His tools were in widespread use among the research scientists in the organization and greatly facilitated the research workflow.”

Wynn Walker
Computational Biologist at Abgenix Inc.