Ken Brown - Career history

This web page is not necessarily the same as the CV or resume I would send to a potential employer! It is a more-or-less complete CV which contains information that I might, or might not, include in a more targeted CV. (Also, to be honest some mildy un-English hype which, while true, is more the siort of theing that people who try to teach you how to write CVs say you shpuld put in, than anythign I particualrty feel comfortable with)

Contact details & availability

Ken Brown (Robert Kenneth John Brown)

email k.brown@bbk.ac.uk

#email kbrown@kbrown.compulink.co.uk

Phone number on request

Summary

System programmer, biologist, and freelance writer.

I am a highly experienced system administrator of complex, heterogenous IT environments and familiar with all major server operating systems. My main IT achievements have been in introducing new technologies; in operations automation; and in planning and implementing large-scale hardware, software and network migrations. Most recently I have worked with webservers and mailservers on Solaris, and with Exchange 2003 on Windows 2003, also with SQL databases, Cisco firewall technology, and LDAP directories.

I positively welcome change, thrive on intellectual challenge and enjoy meeting and being with a large variety of people. I can communicate quickly and clearly in writing and can meet deadlines. I'm also one of the few so-called "technical" people who actually likes speaking in public.

I'm interested in the impact of the Internet on privacy and the law, and in computer and network security. I'm a regular reader of the Cryptography, Risks, and UK crypto mailing lists.

Outside IT, I have written a large number of magazine articles and reviews. I'm also an amateur naturalist and study biological sciences part-time at Birkbeck College, London.

Employment history

Current employment - Birkbeck College

System Programmer
2000 to date
Central Computer Services
Birkbeck College
University of London
Malet Street, London WC1

Previous employment

Texaco

Principal Technical Analyst

Technical Services Group
Information and Technology department,
Texaco Ltd, 1 West Ferry Circus, Canary Wharf, London SE14

1997 to 1999

My main role was as system administrator of Intranet and Internet web sites. I planned, set up and upgraded the servers, wrote automation scripts, developed and implemented security policies, naming conventions and storage management strategies. Successfully determined and fixed many system and application software problems.

This job was terminated by a redundancy agreement, due to downsizing in preparation for the merger of Texaco and Chevron which took place the next year. I welcomed the redundancy as it gave me time to concentrate on studying for a while, and the opportunity for some travel.

Other activities:

1994-1997: Technical Analyst and then Principal Technical Analyst
1992-1994: Senior Analyst Programmer

November 1991-June 1992

Migrated all our mainframe systems from London to Tulsa Oklahoma, to a tight deadline, which we met. It was achieved in four months from the decision being announced.

The mainframe system we migrated included something like 60 Gb of data in 15,000 datasets, over 500 TSO and 1,000 CICS accounts; more than 3,000 COBOL programs for about 20 large and well over 100 small applications; and over 2000 users of Profs email and office systems.

Despite making my own job and a number of others redundant, this was probably the work I most enjoyed doing at Texaco. We worked to an unmovable deadline - if we weren't completely ready on the day the job would have still been done, but done badly. The effort involved, which included weekend and overnight work, was invigorating. The project was entirely successful and transparent to the users. This was a world-class success for a migration of this type My own contribution was both crucial and successful. This was mainly because I had already developed close working relationships with many of our colleagues in the US; and also because I had both a better overview of all the systems than most of the others, and a detailed internal knowledge of VM and MVS.

1988-1991 Senior System programmer.
1985-1988: successively Trainee Systems Programmer, Junior Systems Programmer, Systems Programmer.

1982-1985: Inland Revenue Statistics Division, Durrington, Worthing.

EO Analyst/Programmer working mainly on the Corporation Tax model (in COBOL) and on a simulation of oil taxation (in Fortran). During the time I was there we moved from George 3 on an ICL 1900 to MVS. I taught myself ISPF development and set up panels and menus to generate JCL for end-users.

1979-1980: teacher, Kiburu School, Kiburu, Kenya.

Volunteer teacher with the Church Missionary Society. I taught English as a second language to secondary school students whose first language was (mostly) Kikuyu.

I lived in a small village about 80 km north of Nairobi for 4 school terms. The experience was enough to convince me that I don't want to be a secondary school teacher although I loved living in Africa. It was also interesting getting used to life without electricity or running water.

Other jobs

Before 1979 I worked part-time in a library during my 6th form years, and occasionally a small printing works; and I was employed for about 6 months by Durham University Botany Department as a research assistant doing a literature search into the genetics and breeding of field beans (Vicia faba)

Education and academic interests

2003-2005: University of London, Birkbeck College School of Crystallography

MSc Bioinformatics (passed with Distinction)

Among topics taught in classes:

  • Programming in Perl, Java and SQL with special reference to bioinformatic applications
  • Ddatabase design (using SQL with MySQL)
  • XML interfaces to databases including XSLT, Xpath, markup languages such as CML, SBML, CellML
  • Genome analysis using software such as Blast, ClustalW, Fasta, and online resources such as CATH, GenBank, HapMap, KEGG, OMIM, PDB, SwissProt, and the resources at Entrez/NCBI
  • Mathematics tutorials - "catch-up" classes as a prerequisite to the more advanced statistics and modelling courses - roughly to A-level standard in a selection of topics relevant to the sublect including vector & matrix algebra, differential equations, integration, trigonometry, optimisation, complex numbers Fourier analysis.
  • Statistics. Most work was done using the the R implementation of S statistical programming language. Included advanced topics such as Bayesian methods, network causality models, microarray analysis
  • Sequence analysis. Substitution matrices, position-specific scoring, likelihood tests, dynamic programming, Hidden Markov Models, profile alignments, multiple sequence alignments and so on
  • Protein structure and folding, molecular modelling, graphic representations of structures, & molecular
  • An introduction to Systems Biology briefly touching on microarrays, gene expression networks, regulational and post-transcriptional regulation of expression, data-mining, and other topics.

  • My research project was on the prediction of highly expressed genes in bacterial genomes using various measures of codon usage bias.

    1997-2001: University of London, Birkbeck College

    BSc Biological Sciences, 1st class honours.

    The course at Birkbeck complements rather than repeated the earlier degree I took at Durham. There I mainly studied traditional botany, ecology, social anthropology, and human and economic biology. At Birkbeck I concentrated on evolutionary biology and microbiology - including a final-year project on the microbiology of silage, involving extracting and sequencing bacterial and fungal DNA; and also attendence at the Marine Microbiology residential course at the Millport Marine Biology Station

    I'm currently studying informally at Birkbeck (where I work) with a view to taking part-time PhD. The fields that catch my imagination most in Biology are biodiversity and conservation, particularly the microbial ecology and invertebrate diversity of urban and industrial areas. I've been working on some simple individual-based modelling of bacterial communities. I'm also interested in evolutionary genetics and the origins of the major groups of organisms.

    1975-1978: St. John's College Durham University.

    BSc General Science, 2nd class. (at that time general degrees from Durham were not divided into 2.1 and 2.2). I took a number of courses, mainly in Botany and Anthropology.

    1968-1975: Varndean Grammar School, Brighton

    Personal details:

    Born Brighton, 11th January 1957 (I am a British citizen).

    Divorced, with one child.

    I'm an LEA appointed governor of a primary school in Lewisham. During 1998 our school failed its OFSTED inspection and there was been a stressful period of intense and tiring work from the teachers and other staff in order to bring the school out of special measures. My main contribution as a governor was as a member of the team that appointed head teacher under whom the school successfully came out of special measures. The process was much more difficult than normal because of the interest of the local authority, HMI and the press in the failing school and because of the unusual circumstances in which our previous head left us. In co-ordination with the LEA we had to draw up job and person specifications and decide on our criteria for appointment (maybe 6 days work for our team). We also had to approve advertisements and decide on the recruitment timetable. Then I was on a panel of governors and councillors who interviewed the candidates and made the appointments. Because no appointment was made the first time round there were 3 rounds of advertising and application, including perhaps 20 hours of face-to-face interview. The school improved immensely over the next few years. Since then I've also been on the team that recruited the successor to that head teacher - a rather more pleasant task!

    I have been a member of the PCC of a Church of England parish church, and am currently its representative on Deptford Deanery Synod. I am training as a Reader in the diocese of Southwark and occasionally lead services or preach.

    My leisure activities include birdwatching and other natural history (I'm a member of the British Arachnological Society and also the RSPB and the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust.), cycling, learning about the history and architecture of London and other cities, reading and writing science fiction, and quizzes.

    I was on the Durham team which won the 1977/78 series of the TV quiz "University Challenge" - we won 7 games without a defeat. 21 years later I was on the Birkbeck College team for the 1998/99 series. We got to the quarter-final and were beaten - by one question - by the eventual winners.

    I've written a small number of articles and reviews for computer magazines and a much larger number of reviews of fiction for SF magazines, particularly Interzone. I collaborated with David Pringle, the editor of Interzone on the first edition of The Ultimate Guide to SF

    Details of IT experience

    Computer operating systems:

    Computer languages:

    At the time of writing I mainly use Perl

    At Birkbeck I have written a number of small systems connected with student registraton and the automation of username maintenance, on both Unix and Windows servers, using CGI/HTML as a user interface and MySQL as a data store.

    I have written significant production code in Perl, Rexx, COBOL, Fortran and many scripting/batch languages including Unix Bourne shell, Korn shell, Awk, Lotus Notes macros, MVS JCL, TSO Clist and DOS batch files.

    I've written smaller programs in: Visual Basic (& various traditional Basics), Javascript, IBM 370 Assembler, VM Exec and Exec2, and SAS.

    I've had some experience (such as making small amendments to existing programs) with Java, PHP, C, C shell, APL and PL/1

    Training courses attended:

    My computing career began with a 13-week course run internally by the Inland Revenue, mainly on COBOL programming. I've had formal classroom training in (latest first):

    And a large number of MVS program products such as OPSMVS, UCC1, UCC7, UCC8, MICS, and many others (many now only of historical interest).

    Ken Brown, January 1995, July 1996, June 1998, May 1999, January 2000, February 2003, October 2005