Freezerworks Founder and System Architect honored for Service to International Biobanking

Freezerworks Founder and System Architect honored for Service to International Biobanking

 

For Immediate Release

Mountlake Terrace, WA – March 14, 2016

 

Dataworks Development, Inc. (Freezerworks) is proud to announce that Cheryl Michels, founder, President and System Architect, will be awarded the International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories’ (ISBER) Distinguished Leadership and Service Award for 2016. The honor will be presented at the group’s Annual Meeting, held this year in Berlin on April 4-8.

 

According to ISBER, Michels is being recognized “for her indefatigable commitment and selfless dedication to ISBER.

 

“[Michels] Cheryl served as ISBER Councilor and Board Director from 2008-2014 and Treasurer from 2013-2014. She has been active in the leadership and participation of many committees including Marketing, Nominating, Finance, Strategic Planning, Organizing Advisory and the Informatics Working Group. Cheryl was actively involved in the transition planning and implementation of ISBER as a stand-alone society.”

Michels has been a tireless champion of both ISBER and quality informatics software in the biobanking field, as well as research overall. Prior to joining ISBER, Michels in the late 1980’s to 1990’s served as a key informatics specialist for the Virology laboratories of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group as well as the International Virology Quality Assurance Program for the Division of AIDS. During that time, she served as CEO of Dataworks Development, Inc. and Lead developer for both the Retrovirology Laboratory Management Program (RLMP) and Abbott Retrobase. Both LIMS were instrumental in collecting data for the earliest anti-retroviral drug trials, helping to determine proper AZT levels as well as the efficacy of the cocktail drug therapies that saved so many lives worldwide. The RLMP helped lead to the development of Freezerworks, the flagship product for the multi-million dollar software development company.

 

Michels led a team of developers located in Seattle that included Dan Harville, Shannon Murray, Ken Setran, Don Cherry, and Chris Knickerbocker. This team pioneered the movement in research labs away from “customized software” to “configurable software.”  The movement developed an extremely loyal group of Freezerworks users, and allowed the product to branch out from virology to use in the general research community from all disciplines, including cancer research, drug discovery, museum collections, environmental researchers and crop science.