New JBrowse Lead Developer
We're excited to report that Robert Buels has joined the JBrowse team as lead developer, effective January 10, 2012. He succeeds Mitch Skinner, who created JBrowse in its modern form and more recently been working with the JBrowse "sister project", WebApollo.
Rob has been active in open-source bioinformatics for many years, contributing to a long list of projects such as GBrowse, BioPerl, Chado, Bio::Chado::Schema, Catalyst, and DBIx::Class. Before joining JBrowse, Rob was employed as Engineering Lead at the Sol Genomics Network, a clade-oriented database for plants centered on the Solanaceae family.
As JBrowse lead developer, Rob is responsible for the project's technical strategy, architecture, planning, and coordination, as well as a large part of the implementation. In the coming months, he intends to focus on helping JBrowse mature as a project: solidifying its development infrastructure and incorporating new features and contributions from developers around the world.