Joe Parker

Bio

Joe Parker has been coding since he was given a third-hand C64 back when East Germany still existed (just), fluoro colours were cool (the first time around), and 'coding' was 'programming'. Many years and GOTO statements later he hooked up with housemate and fellow Imperial College undergrad Pete Donnell to found Kitson Consulting based on their mutual incomprehension that so many fellow scientists and statisticians were using expensive, slow, proprietary software for their work. In 2008 he completed a PhD in computational models of RNA virus evolution at Oxford University, and has since worked on HIV vaccine design (MRC Human Immunology Unit) and phylogenomic detection of parallel molecular evolution in mammals (Queen Mary University of London), developing several applications and algorithms in use by hundreds of scientists today. He has published first-author work in top scientific journals including PLoS Pathogens, Current Biology and Nature. He is an avid Java coder and grew up on LAMP but is starting to see the benefits of Ruby on Rails. Like all good programmers he is lazy in the mornings, powered by noodles and coffee, and hates writing the same code twice...