Pittard Consulting of Decatur LLC was founded by Steve Pittard who has close to three decades in Higher Education technology especially as it relates to R education, medical research and bioinformatics. In particular he has a wealth of experience in the design and delivery of High Performance Computing systems and clusters both on-site as well as within the “Elastic Computing” service offered by Amazon Web Services. While the bulk of his experience relates to high end computation and research data wrangling and analysis he is very knowledgeable on general IT issues including systems integration, storage design and management, UNIX system administration, and software development. Mr. Pittard is accomplished in teaching as evidenced by his receipt of the 2015-2016 Departmental Teaching Award in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics in the Rollins School of Public Health.
Prior to his time with Higher Education he wrote software as part of the Nuclear Energy Division of Science Applications International Corporation as well as Lockheed Martin. He has extensive experience in the architecture of high performance computing solutions for Genomic research and can also contribute appropriate language for inclusion in National Institutes of Health grant proposals. As a Research he has co-authored a number of peer-reviewed publications (see below) and is also the co-author and co-patent owner of OmicSeq which is a search engine technology that serves as an Information Hub for Genomic Data. Mr. Pittard is a recognized expert in the R Programming language and is a YouTube and WordPress Blog author dedicated to Data Science and R advocacy.
Flexible R Functions for Processing Accelerometer Data, with Emphasis on NHANES
2003-2006 Van Domelen DR, Pittard WS. The R journal. 2014 December 01; 6(2):52.
Uppal K, Soltow QA, Strobel FH, Pittard WS, Gernert KM, Yu T, Jones DP.
xMSanalyzer: automated pipeline for improved feature detection and downstream
analysis of large-scale, non-targeted metabolomics data. BMC bioinformatics.
2013; 14:15. PubMed PMID: 23323971, PMCID: PMC3562220
Mills RE, Pittard WS, Mullaney JM, Farooq U, Creasy TH, Mahurkar AA, Kemeza DM,Strassler DS, Ponting CP, Webber C, Devine SE. Natural genetic variation caused by small insertions and deletions in the human genome. Genome research. 2011;
21(6):830-9. PubMed PMID: 21460062, PMCID: PMC3106316
Mullaney JM, Mills RE, Pittard WS, Devine SE. Small insertions and deletions (INDELs) in human genomes. Human molecular genetics. 2010; 19(R2):R131-6. PubMed [journal] PMID: 20858594, PMCID: PMC2953750
Iskow RC, McCabe MT, Mills RE, Torene S, Pittard WS, Neuwald AF, Van Meir EG, Vertino PM, Devine SE. Natural mutagenesis of human genomes by endogenous
retrotransposons. Cell. 2010; 141(7):1253-61. NIHMSID: NIHMS223984 PubMed
PMID: 20603005, PMCID: PMC2943760
Mills RE, Luttig CT, Larkins CE, Beauchamp A, Tsui C, Pittard WS, Devine SE. An initial map of insertion and deletion (INDEL) variation in the human genome.
Genome research. 2006; 16(9):1182-90. PubMed PMID: 16902084, PMCID:
PMC1557762
Mills RE, Bennett EA, Iskow RC, Luttig CT, Tsui C, Pittard WS, Devine SE.
Recently mobilized transposons in the human and chimpanzee genomes. American
journal of human genetics. 2006; 78(4):671-9. PubMed PMID: 16532396,
PMCID: PMC1424692
Bennett EA, Coleman LE, Tsui C, Pittard WS, Devine SE. Natural genetic variation caused by transposable elements in humans. Genetics. 2004; 168(2):933-51. PubMed PMID: 15514065, PMCID: PMC1448813
Tsui C, Coleman LE, Griffith JL, Bennett EA, Goodson SG, Scott JD, Pittard WS,
Devine SE. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that map to gaps in the human
SNP map. Nucleic acids research. 2003; 31(16):4910-6. PubMed [journal] PMID:
12907734, PMCID: PMC169912
Griffith JL, Coleman LE, Raymond AS, Goodson SG, Pittard WS, Tsui C, Devine SE. Functional genomics reveals relationships between the retrovirus-like Ty1 element
and its host Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Genetics. 2003; 164(3):867-79. PubMed PMID: 12871900, PMCID: PMC1462630
