Despite being a nebulous and somewhat new role in the startup world, the Chief of Staff role is starting to be recognized and opined upon in a patently tech-forward Medium/Substack type of way — and even in the Harvard Business Review.
My experience as Chief of Staff (CoS) to the President at a small healthtech company, Lokavant, focused on optimizing clinical trials is very niche and definitely not one-size-fits-all. My immensely subjective take on building a company with the backing of another company, Roivant, as well as the very domain-specific nature of my experiences in the clinical trial industry will…
While I was working on Autodesk Life Sciences Team this summer, I was tasked with building a method of automatic annotation that could be applied to DNA sequences for Genetic Constructor. The idea behind this was to create a structured pipeline that would identify Open Reading Frames (ORFs) existing within segments of genetic material.
This is a particularly useful operation, since reportedly less than 2% of the human genome is actively coding. The larger the organism, the more uncertain we are about internal genetic relevance —C. elegans has approximately 25% actively coding and yeast is around 70%. …
At UCSF Mission Bay, in a collaborative project between Peder Larson’s Lab in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging and Roland Henry’s Lab in the Department of Neurology, I’ve been working on building a series of biologically computational pipelines. Primarily, I’ve been supervised by Anisha Keshavan in Professor Henry’s Lab, and she’s provided me with an immense amount of guidance — essentially teaching me from scratch how to meaningfully utilize a computer to extract information about neurological data.
The main tool I’ve been using is Nipype — an open source interface built under NiPy in Python that bundles up…
This summer, I worked on the Autodesk Life Sciences team’s molecular biology design tool — Genetic Constructor — the start to building the ultimate cloud-based, CAD inspired genetic engineering toolkit.
Genetic Constructor is poised to prove itself useful to geneticists in academia and industry alike, but one previously identified user need was local auto-annotation lookup for sequences. The essence of such a feature is expediting the recognition of particular sequences by allowing people to build a robust personal library of sequences that they are familiar with and extend that familiarity into an instantaneous lookup of any given constructed sequence within…