W Benton
Executive Assistant To CEO at Retired and active
Madison, Wisconsin, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolW Benton is an experienced technology and science leader with 17+ years in executive and director-level roles and a career rooted in genomics and bioinformatics dating back to a Ph.D. in Cell Biology from the University of Minnesota. He led informatics and IT at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center and directed knowledge integration at GlaxoSmithKline and NHGRI, bridging research, data systems, and operational leadership. More recently he serves as Executive Assistant to a CEO while remaining active in software engineering through significant open-source back-end contributions to high-profile projects like sbt and Apache Spark. His code work shows a deep practical grasp of build tooling, dependency resolution, SQL semantics, and serialization—skills that complement his scientific data-management background. Based in Madison, WI, he combines domain expertise in genome informatics with hands-on software problem solving, making him adept at translating complex scientific requirements into reliable engineering solutions. A behind-the-scenes connector, he’s equally comfortable refactoring core tooling as he is shaping strategic research informatics programs.
17 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D., Cell Biology, Ph.D., Cell Biology at University of Minnesota
Stackoverflow
303reputation
4kreached
4answers
3questions
Github Skills (23)
ivy10
spark-sql10
big-data10
sbt10
data-serialization10
java10
scala10
serialization10
javas10
sql10
build-tools10
unit-testing8
data-structures6
ant6
code-analysis6
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
apache/spark
Sep 2016 - Sep 2018
Apache Spark - A unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 PRs, 21 comments in 2 years
Contributions summary:W primarily focused on back-end development within the Apache Spark project, as evidenced by their contributions to various components. They implemented SQL features like `SUBSTR` and `BETWEEN` clauses, improved the handling of `HAVING` clauses, and implemented `SQRT` directly in Spark SQL. The user also worked on improving closure handling and serialization within Spark, which included preemptively serializing closures and adding tests to cover various serialization scenarios.
analyticspythondata-processingsqlapache
sbt/sbt
Aug 2013 - Dec 2013
sbt, the interactive build tool
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 commits, 2 comments in 4 months
Contributions summary:W primarily contributed to enhancing the build tool's functionality and configuration options. They focused on improving the flexibility of Ivy resolvers by adding features like descriptorOptional and skipConsistencyCheck. Their work involved modifications to configuration parsing, repository handling, and dependencies within the build tool's codebase. Furthermore, they refactored parts of the configuration parser and updated references to support the latest version of the Ivy library.
zincsbt-pluginscalasbtbuild-tool
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