Samantha is a scientist at DNAnexus. Having lived in the Bay Area since she was 16, she feels more at home in California than anywhere else that she has lived, which includes the Philippines, Virginia, Tennessee, and Minnesota. She studied biomedical computation at Stanford and graduated in 2016. In her spare time, you can find her reading, traveling, playing Stardew Valley, or eating snickerdoodle ice cream.
“Even though my team at DNAnexus is incredibly diverse and supportive, I’ve still had to overcome my own impostor syndrome and others doubting me. I began working full-time in the industry at the age of 20, after graduating from Stanford at 19; I’m currently 22. My status as a young woman has led to challenges at work, which in my naïveté I’d never expected. I’ve been asked if I worked in sales at an almost completely academic conference — while standing next to a poster with my name on it as the first author. I’ve had to request customers that we not meet at a bar that checks ID. I’ve spoken to HR while literally wringing my hands out of nervousness. I’ve had to grapple with my own insecurities and fears while interacting with some of the most important people in the field of bioinformatics.
Today, I’m really proud of a tool I developed alongside my colleagues at DNAnexus and the Baylor College of Medicine called Parliament2, which is a structural variant consensus caller. (Structural variants are large mutations in the genome that are difficult to detect due to the technology we use to understand genomes. Structural variant callers tackle this problem in different ways, but a lot of them are difficult to install or integrate meaningfully; Parliament2 will pre-install the callers you want and integrate their results in an easier-to-read format.) We’ve recently submitted a manuscript to bioRxiv, a preprint journal for biology papers, and I’m first author — this is both my first authorship and my first first-authorship!”
