People
KSM’s associates are multi-disciplinary professionals who excel at all phases of the software development life cycle, from project inception through construction and delivery. We pride ourselves on our professionalism, our technical chops, our delivery agility, and our ability to learn and master our clients’ business domains.
We are
Heather Bernardin
Heather has over 20 years’ experience an electrical engineer and IT professional. She has built solutions for defense and pharmaceuticals companies using C, C++, Java and Oracle. She is particularly adept at understanding the needs of the client and helping them to find a solution that meets their timeline and budget. Heather is Governor of Region E of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), and has previously served as Senator and Lieutenant Governor of the SWE Mid-Atlantic region, and as President, Vice President, Secretary, Newsletter Editor, Scholarship Chair, and collegiate counselor of the Philadelphia section. Heather earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from Lafayette College, and a MS in Computer Engineering from Villanova University.
Steve Caggiano
Steve started his career as a rocket scientist with GE Aerospace, where his interests and expertise turned to relational database design and all things Oracle. After spending a handful of years with First Consulting Group, Steve co-founded KSM. With 20+ years’ experience in information technology, Steve excels at partnering with clients, understanding their business needs, and delivering the best technical solution. The epitome and champion of KSM’s emphasis on deep domain expertise, Steve has delivered solutions that target all phases of the pharmaceutical drug discovery and development pipeline. Steve received his undergraduate degree in Aerospace Engineering with Distinction from the University of Virginia in 1988. He completed a Masters in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994.
Martin Cortez
Martin began his IT career the week after high school graduation, interning at AT&T/Lucent Technologies in Silicon Valley. Over the next five years, he applied the practical lessons learned from his internship to the lessons of theory taught at UC Berkeley, where he earned his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. Today, Martin prides himself in being able to marry the theoretical and practical aspects of the solutions he crafts as a software architect. He has designed commercial software products, custom IT systems, public web services, internal and external websites, APIs, and plug-and-play architectures. His most recent work has been in the pharmaceutical industry, where he has gained extensive knowledge about 21 CFR Part 11 and, specifically, the ICH eCTD specification. In his spare time, Martin likes writing compilers and designing computer languages.
Michael Harnish
Somewhere between an undergraduate degree in philosophy and a planned stint in graduate school, Mike’s professional interests turned to consulting, systems integration, and software development. After twelve years split between Accenture, First Consulting Group, and a high-tech start-up, Mike co-founded KSM as a vehicle to deliver high-value expertise-based consulting services to clients in the life sciences industries. In recent years, Mike led KSM into the utilities industry. His current focus is on creating the computing infrastructure required to realize the benefits of the smart power grid. An unrepentant generalist, Mike has delivered client/server solutions on Windows, web-based applications on a number of Java servers, and integration solutions from full-stack ESBs to minimalist REST frameworks. His current interests include the Scala programming language, cloud computing, and leveraging technology to build the agile company. Mike earned that BA in Philosophy with honors from Swarthmore College.
Jeff Kearney
Jeff has more than 20 years of international leadership experience in the content development, training and IT markets. He has started and turned around businesses in Europe and the U.S. He has lived in Germany and the U.K. Jeff founded XMoLogy, LLC and was the chief conceptor behind ETx, a tool that publishes wiring diagrams directly from engineering information. Jeff is active in the Boy Scouts of America and serves as Scoutmaster for local and regional youth leadership development courses. Jeff also serves as a volunteer operations director for a Chester County home repair ministry. Jeff has a BS in Physics and a Masters degree in Industrial Engineering. He is a member of the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society.
Steve Kirsch
Steve is a consultant with more than 18 years of experience in software development, design, and project management, primarily servicing the pharmaceutical industry. While the majority of his time has been in consulting, he has experience as a product manager for a software company in the pharmaceutical manufacturing sector. He is adept at all phases of the software development life cycle, with a special focus on the delivery of validated systems. Steve’s technical focus has been in the area of database technologies, but also has used Java, .Net, and PHP to build solutions. Steve graduated from Lehigh University with both a Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering and a Masters in Business Administration. He enjoys golf, singing, and spending time with his two active sons.
Emil “Bud” Lefkof
Bud has a bold entrepreneurial streak, and a gift for elevating the play of his coworkers and clients. He has been a consultant and software developer for 15 years, and has delivered bespoke solutions in the drug discovery, manufacturing control, and drug safety domains. In recent years, Bud has focused on providing systems integration services to the utility industry. Bud enjoys building highly-scalable Java web application and web service solutions with the Spring framework and Apache Tomcat, Commons, and CXF. He built a mini-practice within KSM helping clients tame their build processes and achieve continuous integration with Hudson, Nexus, and Apache Maven. An accomplished mobile application developer, Bud published six iPhone applications to the Apple AppStore, and four to the Android Market. He graduated from Bloomsburg University with a degree in Computer and Information Science.
David Luna
David realized his passion for computing after writing his first program in elementary school. This interest served him well during his academic career at Drexel University where he earned his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science with concentrations in Computer Networking and Operating Systems. Upon graduation, he was hired by the Department of Defense to design and build software solutions for military applications. David joined KSM after several years with the DoD, and he has since consulted in the utility and pharmaceutical industries. He has developed for a breadth of platforms and devices and worked under various methodologies include Agile and CMMI. His technical interests include cloud computing, mobile application development, and ubiquitious computing.
Bill Mooney
Bill has been developing distributed software applications for the past 16 years. He has a worked with a wide range of technologies within the financial, pharmaceutical, and logistic sectors. Currently Bill enjoys working with open source technologies such as Spring, Tomcat, and Linux. Bill lives in Havertown, PA with his wife and two daughters. In his spare time, he enjoys studying Latin and playing drums. He earned a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Delaware in 1994.
Chris Piontkowski
Chris is a consultant with over 17 years of experience in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. After working for other people at other peoples’ companies for over a decade, he joined KSM as a partner to help build a solutions-focused company of the best and brightest. In recent years, Chris has been busy helping clients to refactor existing software packages in order to build more cost-effective corporate-wide solutions and to develop web services infrastructure using leading edge technologies. Chris has been providing his clients with JAVA/JEE solutions for over 13 years. His current interests include anything AJAX, JavaScript development tools, and the new technologies that are pushing entertainment onto the web. Chris earned a Bachelors of Science degree in Computer Science from Dickinson College where he learned slightly more than he has subsequently forgotten about Turing machines.
Mike Richardson
Mike has more than 16 years of experience in software development, with over 10 of those years in consulting. Mike has used C, C++, Java, JEE, and Oracle to design and build solutions in defense, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, and transportation. He is experienced with object oriented design, automated testing, and all phases of the development lifecycle. Mike’s current technical interests include Scala, Clojure, Lift, and jQuery. Mike graduated with honors from Virginia Tech with a Bachelors of Science in Computer Engineering. He is a member of the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society.
Janine Roe
Janine is a Certified Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Practitioner with 10 years of professional experience in software development. She enjoys working with experienced Scrum teams, and excels at introducing Scrum to new adopters. Janine has experience with multiple software development life-cycle processes, including Agile, Scrum, iterative, waterfall and Rational Unified methodologies. She has an energetic and dynamic personality, and the ability to motivate a team to work as a cohesive, self-organizing unit. She is a member of the Scrum Alliance, the Lehigh Valley Scrum Practitioners and the Agile Philly User Group. She earned a BS in Education from Kutztown University and an MS in Computer Science from West Chester University.
Mike Schaeffer
After early exposure to Logo at the tender age of 8, Mike developed a borderline obsessive interest in software work that has continued to this day. In the intervening decades, which may or may not have included a side gig as a gangsta rap impresario, Mike combined his loves of software and of lyrical stylings and applied them at companies as large as the Fortune 1 and as small as 1-person Micro ISV’s. Mike’s technical interests include dynamic language design and implementation, and the impact of those ideas on the design of software and the businesses it is intended to support. His business background has been focused on energy markets and commodities trading. Mike graduated with honors in 1993 from the University of Texas at Austin, earning a BS in Computer Science. He conducted undergraduate research in real time systems, completed several graduate level courses, and is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society.
Alton Travis
Alton has more than 16 years of experience in software implementation, integration, and analysis. He has consulted for clients in the pharmaceutical, health care, insurance, and academic research industries. His expertise is in system analysis, architecture, design, and the implementation of enterprise application frameworks. Alton’s technical focus is on Java, JEE, and relational databases, but he has delivered solutions with C++, C#, and the .NET platform. He graduated Cum Laude from Temple University with a BS in Physics with a minor in Mathematics, and started his career as an intern at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the Department of Physics, assisting in with research into photon-photon interactions (Delbruck Scattering). He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the Golden Key National Honor Society.
Dean Zimmerman
Since his first high school programming class in Microsoft Basic, Dean has been forever fascinated by the challenge of software development. He began his professional career as a software engineer and consultant for the pharmaceutical industry, and followed that with building commercial diabetes management software. In more recent years Dean has been developing real-time traffic information systems based on a Java message oriented architecture and his research has led to a patent in traffic algorithms. Lately he has been delving into the development of massively scalable, distributed systems involving technologies such as Hadoop, HBase, and actor model frameworks. Dean graduated summa cum laude from Millersville University with a BS degree in Computer Science.