Ed Sabol earned a B.Sc. in physics with University Honors in 1992 and an M.Sc. in physics in 1994, both from Carnegie Mellon University where he specialized in cosmology, general relativity, theoretical nuclear and particle physics, and computational physics. Prior to graduating, he earned his keep as a graduate student by teaching various undergraduate physics classes and programming physics applications in FORTRAN and Mathematica. As an undergraduate, he worked in the campus's computer clusters and ultimately was promoted to the position of Head User Consultant.
After moving to Greenbelt, MD, from Pittsburgh, PA, he joined the HEASARC as a programmer/analyst in January 1995, where he does web and database programming, develops software solutions and infrastructure to support the HEASARC's online services, and maintains the software for doing database table ingesting and exporting for the HEASARC database. He also designed and implemented the Data Products Layer for the HEASARC DBMS. From March 1996 until May 1997, he was the lead programmer on Browse, a web application for querying the HEASARC's database of high energy astrophysics observational data and source catalogs. In January of 1998, he was promoted to the position of senior programmer/analyst with Raytheon ITSS. He then transitioned with the SESDA contract to Emergent IT and later to SSAI, and then to ADNET Systems for the SESDA-II, III, IV, and V contracts, where he has been promoted to principal developer. He is currently the HEASARC's database administrator and the lead developer of ARK, the HEASARC's Astrophysics Research Knowledgebase, and RPS, the HEASARC's system for Remote Proposal Submission. His favorite programming languages are Perl, C++, C#, and C.
In his spare time, Ed is an avid volleyball player and movie buff.