Alan did graduate work at the MIT Media Lab, and has an undergraduate in physics and mathematics from Brandeis University. Highlights of previous employment include stints at Thinking Machines and Interval Research. Before Science Commons, he worked at Millennium Pharmaceuticals as a senior scientist developing a pathway database and tools to analyze experimental data. His interest lies in structuring biological and clinical knowledge to computationally interpret experimental data. He is involved in several biomedical ontology efforts: the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI), the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO), the Program on Ontologies of Neural Structures (PONS), the Information Artifact Ontology (IAO). These interests and efforts come together in his Neurocommons project. He is involved in standardization efforts - At the W3C he contributed to the HCLSIG in 2006-2007 and co-chaired the OWL 2 working group. He is a coordinating editor of the OBO Foundry.