# Peter Garst

> Machine learning and software engineering

Location: Palo Alto, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/petergarst

Experienced data scientist and software engineer with a demonstrated history of working in biotechnology, machine learning, user interface and education. Strong engineering professional with a PhD in math and MS in computer science.

## Work Experience
### Software Engineer @ Human Longevity, Inc.
Jan 2014 – Present
Genomic data mining, machine learning, and image processing, in Python, C++ and Java.
Machine learning and image processing for MRI images using Keras, TensorFlow, VTK and ImageJ.
Built predictive models for phenotypes.
Put together an RNA pipeline from existing tools and some custom code for gene expression, allele specific expression, gene fusions and skipped exons in tumor tissue.
Built tools around scikit for convenient model training and validation.
Contributions to core and peripheral areas of search.

### Instructor @ University of California Santa Cruz Extension
Jan 2011 – Jan 2014
I taught the course Computational Biology with Java, and recently published the textbook Mastering Java through Biology. See http://www.petergarst.com, or click the link in the contact information section.

### Chief Scientist @ Enventra, Inc.
Jan 2007 – Jan 2014
I developed the MoboMath system for recognition and editing of handwritten math expressions.
See www.petergarst.com/math.html for a link to a demo and a more extensive description, or click the link in the contact section. 
It was based on a highly optimized Earley parser for stochastic grammars, and used neural networks, SVMs, and normal mixture models.
I made many upgrades to neural net software, including adding boosting and tanprop.
Editing operations were supported by the same architecture.
I received a patent for computational linguistics of mathematical expressions.

### Senior Engineer @ Communications Intelligence Corporation
Jan 1993 – Jan 2001
Projects included cursive handwriting recognition; Chinese handwriting recognition; and signature verification.
These were HMM based systems with computational linguistic input.
Also developed a distributed processing system to run training and testing jobs across all the workstations in the group.

### Founder @ Bloomsbury Software Group
Jan 1990 – Jan 1992
Built a symbolic debugger for Yacc compatible grammars and parsers. 
This included a compile time debugger to analyze grammars, and a run time debugger to trace and set breakpoints at significant points in the parse.
Customers included UC Berkeley, IBM, and others.

### Research assistant @ Imperial College London
Jan 1986 – Jan 1988 | London
Research in functional programming languages

### engineer @ Cygnet Systems
Jan 1984 – Jan 1986
Image compression.
Built a file system for write once optical media.
Software for a high performance image workstation.

### MTS @ Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
Jan 1979 – Jan 1984
Signal processing for speech synthesis and recognition.


## Education
### M.S. in Computer Science in Ph.D. in Mathematics
University of Wisconsin-Madison

### Bachelor's Degree in Math
Oberlin College


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/petergarst
- Portfolio: http://www.enventra.com
- Portfolio: http://www.petergarst.com/math.html
- Portfolio: http://www.petergarst.com

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Source: https://flows.cv/petergarst
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/petergarst/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-10