Employee Spotlight: Matt Buranosky

Meet ORAU Employee Matt Buranosky. Matt is an ORAU contractor working at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a database architect. He has been working in the Environmental Public Health Division, creating database applications to house health records for clinical research.

At the Chapel Hill, NC EPA location, Matt and his co-workers have been assembling electronic health records (EHR) into an Oracle SQL database. They are examining the effects of air pollution on public health. They hope to expand on existing software to instruct users on effective database structure.

Why does their work matter? The data they receive can not be analyzed before it is cleaned, collated, and formatted. They develop database applications to organize the data, so that EPA scientists can access information quickly and efficiently. Additionally, they develop open source software to identify association rules between attributes and advise users on how their raw data can be formatted for a (SQL-ready) database application. This will make future, data-driven research easier and more effective. Matt recently published a paper on one of their Python applications called FDTool. You can view the paper at https://f1000research.com/articles/7-1667/v1.

Background

Matt graduated from The College of Wooster in 2017 with a BA in mathematics and philosophy. During his undergrad, he studied basic symbolic logic, set theory, and the foundation of mathematics. Database theory works within the same field. Prior to working with the EPA, Matt was a Department of Energy (DOE) research intern at Argonne National Laboratory. There, he wrote software to analyze numerical simulations of a particle accelerator. He also worked with the Energy Systems Division on a consumer outreach tool which contained hybrid and electric vehicle information, to encourage their purchase.