Todd Safford

Todd Safford is a Senior Software Engineer at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). He is currently a member of the JCVI CAMERA project staff, assisting in the architecture and implementation of web-based Bioinformatics tools. He joined JCVI in 2006, bringing his knowledge of Java enterprise technologies and experience with the Extreme Programming development process. Previously, at Celera Genomics, he served as an Engineer on the Celera Genome Browser, an industry-leading annotation tool employed during the Celera effort to map the human genome. He focused on designing intelligent user interfaces, persisting artifacts of the scientists' research, and visual display of quantitative information in all views and subviews. No stranger to the scientific domain, Safford spent more than eight years designing and building experimental laser systems, two-dimensional beam smoothing by spectral dispersion, and data reduction and control software at the University of Rochester Laboratory for Laser Energetics. His work with researchers on inertial confinement fusion experiments led to his M.S. thesis: Modern Software Development Practices and Their Applicability to Scientific Computing. He has an M.S. in Software Development and Management from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and a B.S. in Physics from the University of Rochester.