Todd Safford has over fifteen years of Software Engineering experience.  He earned his M.S. in Software Development and Management from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and a B.S. in Physics from the University of Rochester. Initially, he 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 then went on to Celera Genomics and served three years 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 scientist's research, and visual display of quantitative information in all views and subviews.  After spending three years working on an electronic mortgage closing system for Freddie Mac, he moved to the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) where he was a key member of the Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA) team.  With his understanding of enterprise software and background in the scientific domain, he was able to assist in the architecture and implementation of web-based Bioinformatics tools, and the full automation of the institutes' data analysis and annotation pipelines on JCVI's large computing grid.

At Janelia, Todd is working on a number of projects which leverage his skills; designing visualization and analysis tools for researchers, implementing novel laboratory tracking systems, and parallelizing image processing routines on the Janelia compute cluster.