Greg Fleishman

I grew up in Thousand Oaks, California - a suburb of Los Angeles. While growing up I enjoyed learning music, reading classical and fantasy/science fiction literature, video games, math, and science. I began higher education in community college where I studied Classical Piano Performance for a few years before switching to science. I transferred to UC San Diego as a bioinformatics student and took equal parts math, computer science, physics, molecular, cellular, and systems biology classes. I also put my musical education to use working as a full time piano teacher to support my cost of living and make payments on my student loans. College was very busy, but I also learned to multi-pitch rock climb using traditional gear and surf.

I moved back to Los Angeles for my PhD at UCLA focused on applied math, image processing, and machine learning to facilitate human medical neuroimaging studies with Dr. Paul Thompson. During this time I really solidified my working practice as a computer scientist supporting complex and novel research data including literature search, algorithm design and testing, implementation, interface design, distribution, and training. I also became acquainted with the international medical image analysis community and regularly attended ISBI, MICCAI, and IPMI. During my PhD I was very inspired by research articles on calcium imaging and wanted to get involved.

I relocated to the east coast and now work here at Janelia to support whole brain calcium imaging and multimodal data integration on a very big data scale. I have become an expert at distributing complex scientific algorithms in a cluster setting sometimes bringing time-to-complete-results down from months to hours. On a recent visit back to California I attended an airshow with my dad and have taken an interest in airplanes and flying. I am now studying to take the FAA "ground exam" and considering pursuing a PPL in flight school.