Andrea Watson
Senior Scientist, Digital Insights at Merck
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolAndrea Watson is a senior scientist who blends eight years of wet-lab and computational expertise to design NGS- and omics-based assays for detection of adventitious viral agents and microbiome analysis. With a PhD in Microbiology from the University of Chicago and roles spanning academia to industry, she builds reproducible, cloud-native Nextflow workflows and champions FAIR data practices across interdisciplinary teams. She has led bioinformatics at Vedanta and contributed backend improvements to the widely used anvi’o platform, bringing practical software craftsmanship to biological questions. Comfortable translating between bench and code, she supervises junior scientists, manages stakeholder relationships up to the C-suite, and solves complex assay and genome-assembly puzzles with a focus on reproducibility and real-world deployment.
8 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Honours Bachelor of Science, Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, Biochemistry, Honours Bachelor of Science, Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, Biochemistry at University of TorontoDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Microbiology, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Microbiology at University of Chicago
English, French
Github Skills (8)
bioinformatics10
python10
metagenomics10
pandas9
visualization8
javascript8
numpy8
visualizations8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
merenlab/anvio
Feb 2018 - Aug 2022
An analysis and visualization platform for 'omics data
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:13 commits, 2 PRs, 7 pushes in 4 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Andrea primarily focused on making enhancements to the `anvio` platform, a bioinformatics tool. Their contributions included fixing bugs, modifying code, and merging branches to incorporate updates. They also worked on refining the code, including changes related to outlier detection and code refactoring. The user also corrected typos and made changes related to the display of contig statistics in the interactive JavaScript visualizations.
pythonmetagenomicssciencemetatranscriptomicsphylogenomics
watsonar/dotfiles
Sep 2017 - Nov 2022
Contributions:6 pushes, 1 branch in 5 years 2 months
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.