David Dorsett, Principal

David Dorsett is the Principal at Anything With Software. Dave has more than 30 years of experience in R&D informatics throughout the global pharmaceutical, chemical, and consumer goods industries. He has an extensive track record architecting, designing, and delivering commercial and in-house R&D informatics solutions. He has implemented commercial and in-house developed informatics capabilities across the R&D spectrum, from early research through late-stage development and the transition to manufacturing.

He is highly knowledgeable in enterprise architecture and software engineering with direct experience in a broad range of technologies, proficiency in leading large global teams, and balancing short and long term needs to create and deliver capabilities. He has a proven ability to bring together IT and business strategy and deliver innovative solutions with strong returns. He has also spent years as a "fire-fighter", called in to analyze projects to determine how to address people, process, and/or technology issues that are inhibiting projects and teams from reaching their goals.

He received his B.S. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley where he also started his long involvement with laboratory automation and data analysis. From Berkeley, he joined Molecular Design Limited (MDL) as a database project manager. He spent the next 13 years at MDL, where he was a key member of the ISIS product team, and was directly responsible for ISIS SAR Table and ISIS for Excel, landmark software systems in research chemistry and biology. He then joined Symyx Technologies as CIO, where he directed the development of software for high-throughput material research, and subsequently founded the software division of Symyx. Over the next 10 years he led the strategy, product architecture, and overall development of Symyx Software, used to digitize high-throughput materials research in many major global life science and chemical R&D organizations. After Symyx, he joined Bristol-Myers Squibb where he was responsible for creating and driving global informatics strategy for pre-clinical development and veterinary sciences functions. He then spent 5 years at BMS directing application architecture, design, development and support for the BMS corporate functions, including bms.com and country-specific internet sites, BMS mobile applications, and systems for legal, compliance, financial services, treasury, and EH&S. In this role, he was responsible for multiple mission and business critical systems, and was one of the leaders in introducing cloud-based platforms along with Agile and DevOps processes to BMS enterprise systems. He also managed the strategy, development and support of cross-divisional enterprise IT platforms and services, including systems integration, EDI, ETL, BPMS, RPA, data migration, ITSM, regulatory and compliance document management, records archiving and application retirement, and application monitoring and centralized testing services.

Dave has an M.B.A from U.C. Berkeley, and several US and European patents in laboratory data automation, data acquisition, and analysis. He has been an invited speaker at R&D informatics conferences, a member of the board of directors of the Association for Laboratory Automation (ALA) from 2007-2010, and a founding board member of the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) from 2010-2014, where he served as President of the Board from 2012-2013. He is also a voting member of the ASTM E13 Committee and a member of the working committee for the 2017 revision of the ASTM E1578-13 Standard Guide for Laboratory Informatics.