Florin Chelaru

Education

University of Maryland, College Park

PhD, Computer Science2011 - 2015

Advisor: Héctor Corrada Bravo
Cumulative GPA: 3.89/4.0
Thesis: Epiviz: Integrative Visual Analysis Software for Genomics

University Al. I. Cuza, Iași, Romania

BSc, Computer Science2004 - 2008

Advisor: Liviu Ciortuz
Cumulative GPA: 9.45/10.0
Class rank: 8 of 176
Thesis: Artificial intelligence in Computer Go

Publications

Metaviz: interactive statistical and visual analysis of metagenomic data

J. Wagner*, F. Chelaru*, J. Kancherla*, J. N. Paulson*, A. Zhang, V. Felix, A. Mahurkar, N. Elmqvist, H. C. Bravo, Nucleic Acids Research, gky136, Feb. 2018 doi.org/10.1093/nar/gky136

Epiviz: a view inside the design of an integrated visual analysis software for genomics

F. Chelaru* and H. C. Bravo, BMC Bioinformatics, 2015;16(Suppl 11):S4. doi:10.1186/1471-2105-16-S11-S4.

Epiviz: interactive visual analytics for functional genomics data

F. Chelaru*, L. Smith, N. Goldstein, and H. C. Bravo, Nature Methods, vol 11, no. 9, pp. 938-940, Aug. 2014.

epivizr: R Interface to epiviz web app

H. C. Bravo*, F. Chelaru, L. Smith and N. Goldstein, Bioconductor Package, 1.4.2.

Combining old-fashioned computer go with monte carlo go

F. Chelaru* and L. Ciortuz, Proceedings of the 2008 10th International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing, SYNASC 2008, 2008, pp. 216–222.

The general Chinese remainder theorem

S. Iftene* and F. Chelaru*, International Scientific Journal of Computing, vol. 6, issue 1, pp. 44-50, 2007.

Employment

Google LLC

Senior Software Engineer; Tech Lead ManagerFeb 2017 - Jan 2022

Lead a team of engineers at Google, in the Cloud Monitoring group and designed large parts of a cloud resource metadata ingestion system consisting of several micro-services and an API. Some of the technologies used include Cloud Spanner, Cloud Pub/Sub and Kubernetes Platform.

Twinfog Inc.

CTOJun 2016 - Feb 2017

Founded Twinfog, a geolocation-based Reddit for helping communities of expats. I designed and implemented the Twinfog cross platform mobile app using Xamarin (C# .NET) for the UI, and ASP.NET MVC, SQL Server and Azure Cloud Services for the back-end.

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Postdoctoral AssociateAug 2015 - Jun 2016

Expanded on the work done for my Ph.D. by designing a series of open-source visualization libraries for genetic variants analysis. Base library code available here: https://github.com/florinchelaru/vis.js.

Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology

Research AssistantJan 2011 - Jun 2015

Research Assistant in the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, at the University of Maryland, College Park. I created and developed Epiviz (epiviz.org), a big data visualization and analysis tool for epigenetics and genomics. Featured in Nature Methods (nature.com/articles/nmeth.3038) and adopted by Genentech.

Rocket Fuel - Artificial Intelligence Team

Graduate Intern2014 - Jun-Sep
2013 - Jun-Sep

Worked on the Artificial Intelligence (Ad Prediction) team. Designed and implemented Machine Learning, probabilistic models and a Visualization tool to improve conversion rates for online ads.

Facebook - Site Integrity (Spam Detection)

Graduate Intern2012 - May-Aug

Worked on the Spam Detection team, using Machine Learning models to aid in the detection of malicious users and content.

University of Maryland Department of Computer Science

Graduate Teaching Assistant2011 - 2013

CMSC702 – Computational Systems Biology
CMSC433 – Parallelism and Multithreading in Java
CMSC420 – Data Structures

Microsoft Inc. - Office Team (Lync Server)

Software EngineerJun 2010 - Jan 2011

Designed database optimization software for improving the performance of the Lync Communication Server.

Microsoft Inc. - Bing Team (Domain Relevance)

Software EngineerSep 2008 - Jun 2010

Designed and developed software for measuring the quality of web search results in the Bing search engine. Created a visualization tool for monitoring the quality and relevance of search result captions.

Code40 Inc. Romania

Undergraduate Internship2007 - Jul-Aug

Designed and implemented components of a web server application for micro-loans: caching, back-end data validation, error handling.

Software Projects

Music with Ms. Johnson (vioara-cu-susanna.ro)

Jan 2023

florin-chelaru/music-with-susanna
The professional presentation page of Susanna Johnson, violin, viola and general music teacher.
TypeScript, ReactJS, Material UI

Epiviz (epiviz.org)

Aug 2014

epiviz, epiviz.github.io
epiviz
A web visualization tool used to aid in the analysis and exploration of large functional genomics data.
JavaScript, JQuery, AngularJS d3.js, WebSockets, PHP, MySQL, R/Bioconductor, Python.

Epivizr Bioconductor Package

Aug 2014

epiviz/epivizr, epiviz.github.io
A package that provides WebSocket communication to the Epiviz web app for interactive visualization of genomic data. Objects in R/bioc interactive sessions can be displayed in genome browser tracks or plots to be explored by navigation through genomic regions.
Authors: H. C. Bravo*, F. Chelaru, L. Smith, N. Goldstein

IsoCreator

Feb 2007

A .NET app used to create ISO 9660 Joliet CD/DVD images from folders on the local machine.
C#, .NET Framework 2.0

Technical Skills

Cloud & Distributed Systems

Kubernetes; worked with it extensively while at Google Cloud

OO Low-level Languages

Java (J2EE); Microsoft .NET (C# and the CLR); C; C++

OO and Functional High-level Languages

Python; R/Bioconductor; TypeScript, PHP

Databases

Mongo DB, SQL (Google Cloud Spanner, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server)

Languages

Romanian (native)

English (fluent)

German (B1 level)