Software Development, Machine Learning, Visualization and Image Processing. My goal is to leverage these technical interests to develop software tools that help advance genomics research.
I started my career as a software engineer in the defense industry and rapidly transitioned into a research and development group. This provided valuable experience both in terms of learning a rigorous software development process as well as understanding the needs of rapid software development in a research environment. I then decided I wanted to apply the software engineering skills I had acquired to help advance medical and genomics research. It was at this time that I transitioned to Jackson Laboratory and since that time I have been focused on developing software tools that help researchers answer questions that help them advance the understanding of genetics and genomics. These tools can take many forms ranging from command line utilities that process and analyze large amounts of data to full web applications with interactive visualizations.
Selected Publications
Highlighted Abstract
High-density genotyping arrays that measure hybridization of genomic DNA fragments to allele-specific oligonucleotide probes are widely used to genotype single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in genetic studies, including human genome-wide association studies. Hybridization intensities are converted to genotype calls by clustering algorithms that assign each sample to a genotype class at each SNP. Data for SNP probes that do not conform to the expected pattern of clustering are often discarded, contributing to ascertainment bias and resulting in lost information - as much as 50% in a recent genome-wide association study in dogs.