Warren Pinnacle Consulting Inc.  Programming Experience.
 

Mr. Clough has well over fifteen years of experience in programming computers.  Warren Pinnacle Consulting is equipped with development platforms for Object Pascal (Borland's Delphi), Microsoft Visual C++, Compaq Digital FORTRAN, and Borland's C++ Builder.  GIS development is supported by Arcview and Arcview Spatial Analyst.

Throughout his education at Phillips Andover Academy and Brown University, Mr. Clough held jobs as a computer consultant and a computer programmer.  While working at these schools, he created mathematical graphics applications, networked a room of computers for economic simulations, installed and administrated a Novell network, and acted as the primary applications consultant for an academic department.

Mr. Clough's coursework at Brown University was highly influential to his programming style. Programs were required to be extensively commented, easily readable, and written in as modular a fashion as possible.  These design elements form the basis of successful team programming.

In 1992, Mr. Clough worked at Draper Laboratories in Cambridge Massachusetts.  At Draper he wrote software in the Ada language on VAX Mainframes while working on a NASA project called "Timeliner."  This user interface language (UIL) is currently in use to provide an interface between astronauts and the space station Freedom.  Mr. Clough tested and debugged the compiler for the UIL and added capabilities to the compiler.  He also worked on technical design documentation and wrote most of the test plans for the UIL compiler.  His work at Draper gave Mr. Clough experience with working on a large software project (with hundreds of thousands of lines) and a large team.  It emphasized the importance of configuration management in such a scheme to avoid conflicts between programmers.  Mr. Clough received an employee recognition award for his support of the project during his semester in Cambridge.

After graduation from Brown Mr. Clough moved to Washington, DC, and became an Environmental Consultant with Abt Associates.  In Washington, computer work was his primary focus as he created spreadsheet models, ran sensitivity analyses of several models, and provided user-friendly interfaces for existing models. One of these projects that remained in use after he left Abt was the creation of a user-friendly interface between Abt's micro-computers and the often cryptic output from the US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) mainframe.

Mr. Clough's primary task at Abt eventually became his work on AQUATOX, an ambitious and general modeling project that traces the passage of organic toxicants through various water systems and the food chains within those systems.  His first task was the creation of a windows-based and user-friendly interface for the model. AQUATOX currently includes straightforward parameter entry on scrollable screens, easy-to-read output tables, editable graphs of output, and functions that export output data to various database formats.

As well as creating this interface, Mr. Clough completed the transition of the model into object-oriented code that provides additional flexibility to the model. Each of the elements within the model (the fish, the water, the toxicant, the site, etc.) are represented by different objects which have appropriate methods and characteristics. Converting the model to object code provided the ability to quickly add capabilities to the code and to change the capabilities of one portion of the code without affecting all other parts of the program.

Mr. Clough has been a self employed sub-contractor to the US EPA since December of 1995.  During this time, he has continued to focus on AQUATOX and other bioaccumulation models.  For AQUATOX, he recently modified the code to enable multi-dimensional modeling and to improve the simulation of sediments for riverine simulations.  The model is being distributed by the EPA at the following site: http://www.epa.gov/ost/models/aquatox/.  Additionally, you can visit the AQUATOX homepage that I created for this project in 1996.