Wednesday, March 02, 2011

Off to Maryland

I'm off to Maryland for a job interview.  I'm interviewing for a position as a QA Manager at a small company that creates software to help translational research.  What is translational research you might ask?  It's the idea that you put together all the clinical, phenotypic, genetic, test results, etc. etc. etc. and use it to draw new conclusions and develop new therapeutics.  Right now, it's very messy and no one does it well.

In my opinion, what's needed in software for translational research is an emphasis on user experience and usability.  So far, the companies that have tackled it have concentrated on the back end, because of a belief that getting all the disparate data together is the hard part.  When really the hard part is in building something that someone who is not a computer expert can use to query and to explore data.  I don't think anyone has really gotten that right yet, though I'm going to see if maybe this company is closer than anyone else.

I'm staying a couple of extra days to see friends, so I'll have some fun while I'm gone.  Hopefully, something will come of this and I'll be able to get out of here.

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