The list of developers who've contributed to XNAT over the years is long and storied. XNAT's history dates back to the early 2000's in a neuroimaging lab at Washington University in St Louis. And most of the contributers over the years have stayed with the project in one venture or another.
Who came up with the idea for XNAT?
XNAT was the production of a collaboration between Randy Buckner and Dan Marcus. The 2 pioneered an idea for a new web based datastore for neuroimaging data and started work on a prototype system as early as 2002.
Mr XNAT
Throughout XNAT's 20 year history, the one constant has been the visionary leadership of Dan Marcus, who has directed the project from its inception to the present day. Dan shaped the idea for what the system should do and designed how it should look and work, and continues as PI on the XNAT R01 to this day.
In 2003, Dan and Randy hired software developers Tim Olsen and Mohana Ramaratnam to finish the prototype system (used to store data for WASHU's ADRC). The small team worked on the prototype system and started pioneering some of the concepts that would be pivotal to the future application's design and feature set.
In 2004, grant funding was raised to formally start the XNAT project, and the software as we know it today began to take shape. Mohana worked on the pipeline engine (a separate application to manage image processing) and Tim began a rewrite of the web application to position it for the wider scientific community. All managed by Dan's faithful leadership.
The Godfather of XNAT
Tim Olsen was the lead architect and developer of the XNAT platform from its inception through 2012. He designed several of the components which are still at the heart of the system today (search engine, dynamic data modeling, configurable site navigation, and the early RESTful API) as well as managed several of the worlds largest XNAT's day to day operations. In those early years, when people would come to the lab to ask about the project they'd be directed to Tim for their techical questions. Often one would comment on the pictures of Tim's large family (4 kids at the time) and Tim would always point out that 'XNAT was my first child' as it pre-dated all of them. From this, Tim was sometimes referred to as the 'father of XNAT'. When Tim left the core team in 2012, to start building up the commercial arm of the project, the title of father was no longer appropriate so he negotiated the title 'Godfather of XNAT'. A title he still proudly proclaims today.
In those early years, the team of Dan, Tim and Mohana gradually expanded to add some new faces to the effort. Kevin Archie joined the lab and wrote XNAT's DICOM handling logic (which originally existed in a seprately installed application). Misha Milchenko joined the team and built a desktop application for managing imaging data that could be uploaded to XNAT (the original XNAT Desktop app). Rick Herrick joined the team and added some modern Java framework structures to XNAT's homegrown structures (Hibernate, Spring). In 2012, the title of XNAT Lead Developer shifted from Tim to Rick with the pass of a baton, as Tim headed out to be CTO at Radiologics, and Rick led the project from the 1.6 release through 1.8 (including the WAR only install and the modernized plugin framework).
During XNAT's second decade, the XNAT Container Plugin was developed by John Flavin and has become a core plugin for the community. Matt Kelsey added the Event Service in 1.8 which is managing the ongoing queuing needs of XNAT to this day. Mike Hodge made contributions to XNAT in support of the Human Connectome Project and Jenny Gurney made contributions in support of the flagship XNAT (CNDA) run at WASHU since the earliest days. And Charlie Moore joined the team as the resident XNAT QA expert and has kept a watchful eye over the project, safeguarding it from errant deverloper commits. And Will Horton has managed the UI design of XNAT from 2010 to present.
During the second decade, a parallel team grew at Radiologics; providing commercial support for XNAT and developing proprietary products using the platform. Dan Marcus (President) and Tim Olsen (CTO) led the company, and gradually grew a team (James Dickson, James Ransford, Brian Holt, and many more) which provided a variety of services to the wider open source project.
In 2021, the disparate teams working on XNAT started to unify at Flywheel, eventually combining the teams from both the open source side (WASHU) and the commercial arm of the project (Radiologics). And some of the members who had left for other efforts returned to the unified team to support XNAT's ongoing development by Flywheel. At Flywheel, Kate Alpert became the Lead XNAT Developer and led the effort for several of XNAT's 1.8 releases, with Tim, Rick, Flavin, Mohana and the gang continuing to contribute code to the project. And, the team expanded to its largest size ever.
Over the years, XNAT has had contributions from over a dozen developers and multiple organizations. And in a sign of the commitment and affection that most have for the project, most of them continue to work on the platform after a dozen or more years.