Autobiography Jim
Groeneveld
Since August 2014,
already aged 65½, I have retired but may occasionally perform freelance
assignments.
OCS Consulting
From March 2006 to
July 2014 I have been employed by OCS Consulting in
Vitatron
From August 2003 I
have been employed at Vitatron HQ in
Imro-Tramarko
Before joining Vitatron I worked for the CRO Imro-Tramarko
for almost 4½ years, both as a (senior) statistician and as an IT-manager. As a
statistician my job was a.o. to develop statistical
analysis plans from study protocols and in a later stage to perform statistical
analysis for various clinical research projects of sponsors in the
pharmaceutical industry. Together with colleagues of the DM department I
carried out the data management (using Clintrial and
SAS) in the national study on medically prescribed heroin. In order to
facilitate statistical analysis I have been developing routine SAS macros for
data manipulation and presentation. During that time I have been nominated as
Rookie-of-the-year-1999 on the SAS internet forum SAS-L. As an IT-manager my
task could be summarized best as taking care of optimal use of available and
new hard- and software for the whole company. More specifically this goal was
reached by managing people, maintaining the website, and validation, writing
SOPs and MANuals, according to GCP, on backup and
recovery, security and encryption and the like.
IKR / Crucell / MuConsult
Before that I have
worked as a statistician for 1½ years in the cancer registry team in the
Comprehensive Cancer Centre Rotterdam (IKR). It was there that I firstly got
acquainted with SAS software. My task was to give statistical support to
scientific papers being published. From that time on I occasionally
additionally have been working as a free-lance statistical consultant in the
field of biotechnology (Crucell/Introgene). Preceding
that job I worked in traffic research as a social scientific researcher within
small research company (MuConsult) for a few months.
One of the main projects that I have been working on concerned people's
transportation behaviour during leisure time.
TNO
My first
employment after my study was with TNO (Netherlands Organization of Applied
Research), where I have worked for 17 years. Initially I was appointed as a
social scientific researcher / methodologist in the field of noise annoyance. I
was the first statistician in one of TNO's institutes and as such I not only
managed and performed my own projects, but also did the statistics part of them
using SPSS, as well as that of my colleagues' projects. The work mainly
concerned national and international (European) field research to support noise
abatement legislation in various countries. Noise annoyance and disturbance was
measured as the experience of people being exposed to industrial, traffic, and
other type of undesired, noisy sounds in their living or working situation. In
the meantime I got to know various other statistical software
and maintained a comprehensive list and review of freely available statistical
software. Occasionally I have provided courses in (statistical) software.
During my time at
TNO I have developed a complete database package for data entry and revision
(DAPHNE), with links (conversion) to SPSS. Furthermore I built a (Dutch)
hyphenation program (KAPAF) based on fuzzy logic (probability), which was being
used as a preprocessor with text processing software. Both software packages
were programmed in Fortran on a mainframe computer.
The last 5 years of my employment with TNO I have been working in the area of
medical informatics. The aim was to develop advanced (medical) information
systems under Unix. My main project has been
developing a user-friendly GUI (in C) for data analysis, running a (any)
statistics package in the background on a server, converting data and
generating statistics command language. The statistical software in this case
was EpiInfo, for which I was a beta-tester as well.
During that time and later I have been developing various other data conversion
software in BASIC and C as well. I used to be a postmaster in a Unix-PC
network.
Studies
During my
specialization as a methodologist / statistician in (social) scientific
research I learned to program with the statistical software SPSS and in Fortran (on mainframe). This was part of my academic study
in educational psychology (Dutch: orthopedagogiek) at
the State University of Groningen. That study focuses on the methods to aid the
physically and/or mentally handicapped people, in particular children with
learning and behavioural disorders. Both during and
after my study I have been managing fellow students with their research. Years
before that I have been studying electrical engineering at the Technical
University Twente in Enschede,
a study which I decided not to finish at that time. I had choosen
that study after finishing highschool with highest
scores on mathematics because of the link to one of my hobbies.
Version date: 6 August 2014