Amber Biology Celebrates 7 Years

From Amber Biology Partner, Gordon Webster:

It's hard to believe that 7 years has passed since I decided to make the leap and work for myself. In February 2013 I founded the digital biology research firm Amber Biology, to meet the growing demand for computational expertise in life science research and development. Just a couple of years later in 2015, I had the great, good fortune to find the ideal business partner in Alex Lancaster. Working together at the intersection of life science and computation, we have seen Amber Biology grow from a company in which our projects were largely hosted and run on our desktop computers - to a company in which the scale of the projects often require the power of Amber Biology's own dedicated server hardware, or (for our largest projects), even clusters of Amazon's web servers.

Over the years, we have had a lot of terrific clients who have given us the opportunity to participate in some amazing R&D projects ranging from the modeling and simulation of cell-signaling pathways, to the detection of potential earth-like exoplanets orbiting distant stars. As members of the mission team for NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, we got to add our signatures to a metal plaque that was attached to the spacecraft prior to its launch from Cape Canaveral on one of SpaceX's new generation of rockets.

During these years, Alex and I collaborated on a book "Python for the Life Sciences", that we wrote expressly for the growing audience of life science researchers who need to learn to code so that they can use computation in their own research. Our book went on to be published by Springer/Apress and we have now created a workshop-based course around it that we have taught at both MIT and Harvard Medical School.

All in all, it's been an incredible 7 years, and we are extremely grateful to all of the organizations who have hired us to help them with their research and development programs. I hope our next 7 years in the exciting field of digital biology, will be as eclectic, exciting and enjoyable as the first 7 years have been. We have also have some exciting new ventures planned, about which we cannot say too much right now - but watch this space!

Gordon