Personal Data

Male, born in 1952 in Ormskirk, Lancashire, England.
Dual Canadian and British citizenship. Valid US work permit.

Academic Qualifications

Ph.D. 1985 University of Arizona, USA
Major in Geosciences (dendroclimatology)
Minors in Statistics and Plant Physiology
Dissertation Title:
Tree-Ring Response Functions: An evaluation by means of simulations.

M.S. 1981 University of Arizona, USA
Major in Geosciences (dendroclimatology)
Thesis title:
Reconstructions of North Pacific Surface Pressure Anomaly Types from Alaskan Tree-Ring Data.

B.Sc. 1975 Liverpool Polytechnic, UK (now John Moores University)
Applied Biology (Ecology)

Skill Set

I perceive my skills as being an independent self motivated problem solver. The greatest pleasure is identifying, through logical processes, what is the problem and coming up with solutions. I work best either independently or as a member of a small team being responsible for my own work. The type of problem is somewhat irrelevant as can be seen from my academic and work history.

Professional Positions

1989-2008 Systems Programmer, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA
1988-1989 Biostatistician, University of Arizona College of Medicine, Tucson, Arizona, USA
1987-1990 Owner/founder Philip Gale Solutions, Tucson, Arizona, USA
1985-1987 Project Specialist, ProSight Corporation, Tucson, Arizona, USA
1984-1985 Research Assistant, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA
1981-1984 Graduate Associate, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA
1978-1981 Graduate Assistant, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA
1975-1978 Research Assistant, Freshwater Biological Association, Reading UK
1971-1975 Undergraduate, Liverpool Polytechnic, Liverpool, UK
1974 Undergraduate Assistant, Cumbria River Authority, Carlisle, UK
1972 Undergraduate Assistant, Freshwater Biological Research Unit, Northern Ireland, UK

Professional Experience

As a member of a 5 person systems staff I have been jointly responsible for the day to day operation of the computers in the Computer Science Department of the University of Arizona. The computers in this department currently include a mixture of 200+ Intel based systems running WindowsXP and/or 'Fedora linux'. There are 20+ networked laser printers. My major responsibilities have been in the areas of account administration (1200 users), backups of the 3+TB of central disk storage onto remote disk and archived to sDLT tape. Wire/rewire department as network needs continue to evolve (thick/thin/10baseT/100baseT). Develop html and cgi pages and other applications to automate various aspects of account administration.
I maintain the contents of a web site of archival material dealing with aspects of textiles and weaving that averages over 100,000 downloads of PDFs per month and contains over 20GB of archival material in PDF format (http://www.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving)

As a biostatistician in the Office of Biostatistical Services of the College of Medicine my primary responsibilities were for assisting in the initial experimental design and subsequent statistical analysis and interpretation of experiments performed both within the College of Medicine and also by researchers at the University Medical Center.

"Philip Gale Solutions", founded in 1987, was a mail order company producing and distributing microcomputer software. It was responsible for the production and marketing of two packages for home per owners (CAT-VET and DOG-VET). One of these packages (Cat-Vet) was favorably reviewed in an issue of PC Magazine (v6,17).

Private consulting contracts have concentrated on trouble shooting microcomputer problems, data transfer information. This program is designed for use by law between machines of different types and design of suitable microcomputer systems. Custom programming in a variety of languages has been performed to meet specific requirements such as data transfer between commercial packages, conversion from one package to another, conversion from once computer operating system to another and subsequent data transfer. Instruct and advise clients on future purchases of hardware and software. Customers have included individuals, institutions, and engineering company, a small drug store, a real estate management office, anesthesiologist billing office and a local church.

As a member of a small corporation I helped develop a national online database of criminal activity in the United States National Parks and Forests. I developed a microcomputer data-entry program intended for service-wide distribution to be used to 'feed' information into the centralized national database housed on a super-minicomputer. Federal budgetary cutbacks resulted in the discontinuation of the project before full implementation.

Freshwater biological experience was obtained during undergraduate studies involving eutrophication in Lough Neagh (Northern Ireland) and post-pollution stream recovery studies in Carlisle (England). Subsequently I secured a position as a biological research assistant in the Lamborne Project of the Freshwater Biological Association. The Lamborne Project was a long term biological/ecological study of a chalk stream system in order to evaluate the ecological impacts of introduction of large volumes of pumped groundwater into the ecosystem in times of drought and subsequent water needs in metropolitan London.

Computer Experience

I have been involved in applications programming of computers since 1978 and have worked with various computer languages on a variety of machines with different operating systems. The following is a summary of my experience with computers:

LANGUAGES:
Fortran (both 68 and 77), BasicA, Turbo-BASIC, S-Basic, Pascal, SPSS,
BMDP, SNOBOL4, LISP, APL, Turbo-Pascal, CP/M Assembly Language, ZIM, C, csh

EDITORS:
SOS (on a DEC-10), Perfect Writer, WordStar 3.3 & 2000,
WordPerfect, ED, EDLIN, SED, UEDT, EDT, vi, Word

OPERATING SYSTEMS:
TOPS-10, NOS/BE, CP/M, MS-DOS, AOS/VS, VAX/VMS, UNIX, Mac O/S v7.x, Mac OS/X,
Windows95/NT/2000/XP, Solaris, RedHat Linux, Network Appliance NFS server, Fedora, FreeBSD

COMPUTERS:
DEC-10, CYBER-175, IBM-PC/AT, KAYPRO, MV10000, VAX-8650,
MicroVAX, Sequent S81/10, Sun 4/490, Sun 4/110, Sun 4/65, Sun S1000, HP-9000/800,
NeXt, SGI GVX-480, Apple Macintosh, DEC-5000, DEC-Alpha, Sun Sparc,
Intel Paragon supercomputer, Pentium based Windows, Pentium based 'linux'

Professional Publications

During my academic career I was the primary author on numerous peer and non-peer reviewed publications.

http://www.cs.arizona.edu/people/jcropper/resume.html
March2008