Who We Are
Piedmont Frontier LLC is a technology consultancy based in Frederick County, Maryland, specializing in compliance infrastructure for organizations handling genetic and health data. We build the systems that operationalize complex, overlapping privacy requirements — HIPAA, GINA, MODPA, the Common Rule, NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy, and state privacy laws — where they intersect and conflict.
The firm was founded by Lawrence E. Stewart, who serves as CTO and principal engineer. Lawrence brings twenty-five years of hands-on technical experience spanning high-performance computing, scientific software, systems administration, and applied AI. Before founding Piedmont Frontier, he spent a decade as software engineer and CTO at VeraChem LLC, a computational chemistry company whose software is used in pharmaceutical drug discovery research. That scientific computing background — molecular biology, genomic data formats, statistical methods — is what makes our compliance work technically grounded rather than checkbox-driven.
What sets us apart: we can classify a VCF file, assess SNP-level re-identification risk, build the consent tracking system, and map the regulatory obligations across six jurisdictions. No Big Law firm can build it. No compliance SaaS vendor understands genomics. No Big 4 practice will do it for less than $250K. We fill that gap.
Leadership
Lawrence E. Stewart — Founder & CTO
Lawrence holds an MS in Computer Science with honors from Hood College (2018) and CompTIA A+, Network+, and Security+ certifications. His technical career spans computational chemistry HPC at VeraChem LLC (ten years as engineer and CTO), twenty-plus years of Linux systems administration, and early career software and web development for small businesses. He has held a FORTRAN instruction position teaching engineering students to program.
His aviation background is unusual and relevant: FAA ATP (Multi-Engine Land), Commercial Helicopter, and Private Glider certificates, with 3,000+ hours of dual flight instruction given across all skill levels. He served as Chief Pilot and Director of Safety at RC&A, overseeing three locations, approximately ten aircraft, and twenty pilots — owning the safety program, FAA regulatory compliance, and day-to-day operations leadership. Prior to that, he flew aerial survey missions for Fugro EarthData, where precision and repeatability were non-negotiable. The discipline of high-stakes systems operation carries directly into how we design and run technical work.
Why Piedmont Frontier
Based in Frederick County in Maryland's Piedmont region — close to NIH, FDA, Johns Hopkins, and the DC/Baltimore biotech corridor. Maryland's MODPA is one of the strictest state privacy laws in the country, and Maryland extends Common Rule protections to all human subjects research regardless of funding source. We know this regulatory landscape because we operate in it.
We practice what we recommend. Our own infrastructure is self-hosted on physical hardware in Frederick County. We audit our AI tooling daily. We don't advise on systems we haven't run ourselves.