Aspera's Michelle Munson Joins GenoSpace Board

January 22, 2015

By Bio-IT World Staff

January 22, 2015 | GenoSpace announced this morning that Michelle Munson, CEO of Aspera, an IBM Company, has joined its board as an independent director.

“We are pleased to welcome Michelle to the leadership team at GenoSpace,” said John Quackenbush, Chairman of the Board of GenoSpace in a statement. “We have had a strong relationship with Michelle’s team at Aspera beginning with some of our earliest customer deployments, and we welcome her depth of experience and clear enthusiasm for applying advanced technical solutions to solving complex problems.”

Munson is the co-inventor of Aspera’s fasp transport technology. The patented, highly efficient bulk data transport technology is used for big data transfer by Netflix, Apple, the Broad Institute, and a wide range of other companies and markets. The fasp protocol (fast, adaptive, secure protocol) enables much faster file transfers than any other software or hardware wide area network (WAN) acceleration solution—all on commodity hardware.

A year ago, Aspera’s acquisition by IBM closed. Since then, Munson and Aspera have pushed on toward the “science DMZ”, which Munson describes as, “a combination of technologies that allow for unmitigated fast, efficient, and secure flow of the large data that powers life sciences research in and out of private network domains.”  

That’s the challenge before GenoSpace as well.

GenoSpace applies its advanced analytical and information integration capabilities to clinical data (it has partnerships with PathGroup and the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, among others). At the Bio-IT World Expo last year, Quackenbush said that GenoSpace plans to make accessible data that researchers can play with in any way they want, and not to limit the types of questions that can be asked.

Doing that means being able to move data quickly and securely.

“GenoSpace is a highly talented and promising team that is focused on fundamentally advancing medicine through innovation at the intersection of genomic science and computing, an area in which I have had significant exposure through Aspera, and which means a great deal to me as a computer scientist,” Munson commented in the statement. “I am honored to help contribute my experience in creating and growing a technology start-up to this exceptional group.”