Government Big Data Solutions Award Nominee: Dr. Ronald Taylor, PNNL

The Government Big Data Solutions Award was established to highlight innovative solutions and facilitate the exchange of best practices, lessons learned and creative ideas for addressing Big Data challenges. The top five nominees and overall winner was announced at Hadoop World in New York City on November 8 2011.

The Government Big Data Solutions Award Program is coordinated by CTOLabs.com. The 2011 judging panel included: Doug Cutting, creator of Apache Hadoop and architect at Cloudera, Alan Wade, former CIA and IC CIO, Ryan LaSalle, Director of Accenture Cyber R & D, Ed Granstedt, Senior VP Director of the QinetiQ Strategic Solutions Center and Chris Dorobek, founder, editor and publisher of DorobekInsider.com.

Dr. Ronald Taylor was a top nominee this year, representing Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, one of the Department of Energy’s national labs. Dr. Taylor has been working in government research on bioinformatics, the application of Big Data analysis to biology, for decades, starting at the DoE’s Argonne National Laboratory in 1989 then the working with the NIH and finally the DoE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He holds numerous awards and multiple patents, and has published extensively, including an influential “overview of the Hadoop/MapReduce/HBase framework and its current applications in bioinformatics.”

Dr. Taylor studies and employs high performance computing techniques such as Hadoop and HBase platforms on Linux clusters for Big Data challenges such as analysis of high throughput gene expression and protein abundance data, and biological database design. He also works on the development of biological data transfer standards and bioinformatics software. Dr. Taylor’s Big Data research helps expand our understanding of health, biology, genetics, and computing, as well as spread awareness of Big Data techniques among the bioinformatics community.