Bill Duncan is a Clinical Associate Professor and seasoned software engineer with over two decades of experience building data systems and ontologies for biomedical research. He blends academic rigor (PhD in Philosophy) with practical engineering—designing ETL workflows, LinkML schemas, and web applications to integrate complex clinical, genomic, and dental EHR data. His work spans academia and national labs, including contributions to the OBO Foundry website and the National Microbiome Data Collaborative, where he focused on UI, ontology review tooling, and linked-data integration. Known for pragmatically applying ontologies to real-world datasets, he has led cross-disciplinary teams to deploy visualization platforms, triple stores, and patient-recruitment pipelines. Based in Gainesville, Florida, he brings a rare combination of deep domain modeling expertise, hands-on full-stack development, and a background in philosophy that sharpens his approach to data representation and semantics.
14 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS, Computer Science, Master of Science - MS, Computer Science at Clemson University
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Philosophy, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Philosophy at University at Buffalo
Bachelor of Arts - BA, Philosophy, Bachelor of Arts - BA, Philosophy at Western Carolina University
Metadata and website for the Open Bio Ontologies Foundry Ontology Registry
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Contributions:12 reviews, 32 commits, 27 PRs in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Bill primarily contributed to the user interface and functionality of the OBO Foundry website. They added features for ontology reviews, including review dates and document links, by modifying the HTML templates. The user also addressed a broken link in the review table and updated the site's user interface, including updating the navigation bar and content on the index page. They also made a language change on the overview page.
Contributions:247 commits, 59 PRs, 185 pushes in 10 months
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