Alistair Rust
Bioinformatician
Letchworth, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlistair Rust is a bioinformatician with 14 years’ experience building robust, automated genomics pipelines and data platforms across top institutes including EMBL-EBI, the Wellcome Sanger Institute and GSK. He combines hands-on full‑stack computational development (R, Python, Perl, containers, HPC) with a knack for turning messy raw data into reproducible analyses, visualisations and automated scientific reports that accelerate decision making. Known for meticulous documentation and mentoring, he often serves as the bridge between biologists and technical teams while still diving into code to resolve thorny data issues. An active open-source contributor, he has improved performance and data-access features in widely used projects such as xarray, Zarr and bcolz, reflecting a focus on scalable, columnar and chunked data solutions. Comfortable with both research and industrial settings, he recently moved into paediatric cancer genomics at EMBL-EBI after leading malaria genomic surveillance work at Sanger, demonstrating adaptability across domains and data scales.
15 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Computer Science, PhD, Computer Science at University of Hertfordshire
Stackoverflow
1reputation
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Github Skills (32)
json10
pytest10
python10
testing10
data-manipulation10
xray10
zarr10
etl-process10
numpy10
dask10
performance-optimization10
xa10
compression10
csv10
data-catalog10
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
petl-developers/petl
Aug 2011 - Aug 2019
Python Extract Transform and Load Tables of Data
Role in this project:
Data Engineer
Data EngineerContributions:20 releases, 1 review, 955 commits in 8 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Alistair's commits focus on enhancing the petl library, specifically related to data analysis, ETL operations, and file format support. They contributed code for creating CSV, TSV and JSON I/O, as well as more sophisticated operations on these formats. They addressed bugs related to both in-memory data manipulations and various data sources, while also implementing the ability to use code that is more streamlined.
python
zarr-developers/zarr-python
Dec 2015 - Apr 2020
An implementation of chunked, compressed, N-dimensional arrays for Python.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Community Contributor
Back-end Developer & Community ContributorContributions:14 releases, 7 reviews, 991 commits in 4 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Alistair primarily contributed to documentation and improvements in the Zarr Python library. Their work included modifying the documentation to reflect changes in the Blosc extension and the addition of examples for object arrays and API docs for new class. Furthermore, they helped with improving the data format by adding and clarifying aspects of how structured datatypes, as well as the storage and caching of data, are handled. Some contributions are related to code quality improvements (PEP8).
n-dimensionalpythonzarrndimensional-arrayscompressed
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