About Us

ISAAC was conceived by Dr. Paul Law, a pediatrician at The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a researcher in the International Health Division. While creating the data management policies and managing the data of several studies, he grew dissatisfied with the inherit waste in having to largely recreate the wheel for each new study, and in his inability to share and combine data from multiple related studies being conducted on the hall in which he worked.

This dissatisfaction grew into a concept for how an easy to use system could be built that would allow for both reuse of development efforts across multiple studies and standardization of data elements fostering collaboration. Read more in this open letter from Dr. Law.

In order to realize his dream, he knew that he would have to find a partner that shared in his vision of a system that would bring researchers together. He found that partner in the Cure Autism Now Foundation, and in particular, in the leadership and dedication of John Shestack and Portia Iversen, the foundation's founders. Since then, CAN has offered continual support for the application.

Dr. Law also understood that for an application like ISAAC to offer true value to Autism researchers, it had to include data entry forms for the standard Autism assessment tools. With that in mind, he set out to gain agreements from the publishers of these tools. Western Psychological Services was the first to sign on, allowing for the inclusion of the ADIR, ADOS, and CARs. In addition, they provided technical support in developing the scoring algorithms for their tools that are built into ISAAC.

Tom Hoen joined the ISAAC team in February of 2002. Since then, he has been responsible for all of the development efforts of the application and to increase ISAAC's visibility within the autism community. Under his leadership, the entire application has been rewritten to increase its performance, now offering many new and useful features. His work also lay the foundation for future growth of the application, provides the user with a more logical and easy-to-use experience, and expanded the user base.

Mr. Hoen spent many years as the product manager for a leading investment bank's web-based investment applications. Before that, he headed up the marketing technology effort at the same bank. Managing the ISAAC effort perfectly combines his skills in web development, marketing, and client management, along with his desire to work on projects that can lead to the greater good.