Greg von Kuster
| greg AT bx DOT psu DOT edu |
Greg Von Kuster began his career in the mid 1980s in Silicon Valley, California working as a software engineer in information technology for Hewlett Packard Company. In 1990 he moved into research and development at HP, ultimately working in HP Labs. During this time Greg was involved in various team-oriented enterprise class software development initiatives. With the introduction of the Internet he was involved with inventing various new web-based technologies including the world's first web-based firewall piercing technology. During the dot-com explosion, Greg continued to participate in leading edge Internet based product development efforts as part of HP's eSpeak Operation, an HP Labs spinoff. eSpeak became the crown jewel of HP's eServices initiative at the time, and as part of this initiative Greg helped lead the development of the world's first electronic services broker. The eSpeak broker enabled both electronic and brick-and-mortar businesses to leverage the internet to advertise products and services to first generation mobile devices and deliver them to customers anywhere in the world. The broker allowed for charges ranging in price from less than a penny to any amount of money.
Greg left HP in early 2000 along with 2 partners and formed a dot-com startup named PyBiz, Inc., where he was the VP of Engineering and handled the corporate finances. The product line included one of the world's first XML databases. PyBiz later became Coherity, Inc., which was eventually acquired by Ipedo. Greg returned to the Silicon Valley corporate ranks and worked for Adobe Systems managing a worldwide support team for several Adobe products.
In 2003 Greg moved to State College, PA, taking a position as VP of Engineering for a Happy Valley startup named Advanced Interfaces, Inc., which eventually became VideoMining Corporation.
In 2006 Greg brought his corporate experience to the Galaxy Team at Penn State University where he managed the Galaxy development effort and played a key role in landing the 2008 grant that enabled the team to grow to include members at Penn State University, Emory University and beyond.
Greg has been involved at some level in virtually every aspect of Galaxy. He introduced processes early in Galaxy's development lifecycle that enabled its pervasive adoption around the world, and continues to leverage his experience to make Galaxy a useful, high-quality product that fills a unique niche in biological research.
Greg wrote the specifications and is the architect and developer of the following Galaxy features and components.
- The first biomedical appStore: the Galaxy Tool Shed
- Enabling the simultaneous use of multiple versions of the same tool in a Galaxy instance
- The demo sequencer, demonstrating Galaxy integration with a PacBio instrument
- Galaxy reports
The following components have gone through several phases of development. Greg was involved with others in the initial phase that resulted in a functional prototype. He leveraged what was learned in building the prototype, and re-engineered the components, improving them to produce what currently exists.