John Pellman

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT JOHN PELLMAN

I’m a Linux systems administrator working at the Simons Electron Microscopy Center, a department of the New York Structural Biology Center. My primary responsibility is managing the day‑to‑day operations of our department’s Slurm cluster. My secondary focus has been on release engineering (i.e, making scientific software deployable and reproducible). Additionally, I’m in the process of revamping a legacy data-processing pipeline while leveraging the scientific Python ecosystem and concepts from functional programming.In general I am very inquisitive and enjoy learning, forgetting, and re-learning in an endless struggle against the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve) that will likely last until the day I die (unless there\'s an afterlife).About my employer:The Simons Electron Microscopy Center is a service center that produces high resolution images (micrographs) of protein structures using cryo‑electron microscopy (cryo-EM). Our clientele (external research groups) can then execute advanced image processing pipelines to build resolved protein structures from micrographs obtained at our facility. These solved structures then serve as critical training and validation data for deep learning models such as DeepMind’s AlphaFold 3, OpenFold 3 and MIT’s Boltz‑1. In this way, we act as an essential upstream data source- alongside other protein imaging service providers- and play a pivotal role in the drug discovery process.