Heath OBrien

Heath O’Brien is a genome scientist with over 15 years’ experience in the analysis of genome-scale data from across the tree of life, both in academia and industry. He has led projects on comparative genomics of bacterial pathogens, de novo assembly of plant transcriptomes, tracking real-time evolution in virus populations, and genome-wide and transcriptome-wide association studies in humans. He originally trained as a lab-based microbial population biologist, but transitioned to data science as the scale of data being produced in the lab exploded, and as the importance of reproducible analyses became clear across the industry. He works primarily with R and Python and is a relatively new convert to Nextflow having been converted by the robust support for cloud computing compared to the workflow managers that he has worked with in the past. Heath will be presenting a talk titled "Empowering Distributed Precision Medicine: Scalable Genomic Analysis in Clinical Trial Recruitment".