Billy Rowell
Senior Staff Bioinformatics Scientist
Durham, North Carolina, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBilly Rowell is a Senior Staff Bioinformatics Scientist at Pacific Biosciences in Durham, NC, bringing over a decade of applied experience and more than 25 years of research engagement in biological data science. He blends hands-on bioinformatics engineering—contributing backend wrappers to the widely used Snakemake ecosystem for tools like pbmm2, samtools, and bcftools—with domain expertise gained at HHMI and Q² Solutions. Known for pragmatic coding ("1x programmer on a good day") and robust pipeline development, he focuses on making complex sequencing tools reproducible and production-ready. Billy holds degrees from UC Berkeley and UNC Chapel Hill and leverages that academic grounding to bridge research and product-scale bioinformatics.
12 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Master's Degree, Master's Degree at University of California, BerkeleyHigh School, High School at North Carolina School of Science and MathematicsBachelor's Degree, Bachelor's Degree at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
English, Spanish
Stackoverflow
63reputation
1kreached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (11)
bioinformatics10
workflow-management10
snakemake10
wrapper10
python10
scripting9
bash9
shell9
script9
sh9
bcftools8
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
snakemake/snakemake-wrappers
Nov 2020 - Jan 2022
This is the development home of the Snakemake wrapper repository, see
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:4 reviews, 10 commits, 12 PRs in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Billy primarily contributed to the development of Snakemake wrappers, implementing functionalities for various bioinformatics tools. Their work includes adding support for new commands within existing tools like Whatshap, pbmm2, samtools, jellyfish, bcftools, and seqtk. They also implemented a bgzip wrapper and improved test cases, demonstrating expertise in expanding the capabilities of the Snakemake wrapper ecosystem.
snakemake
PacificBiosciences/HiFi-human-WGS-WDL
Jul 2023 - Apr 2025
Contributions:21 releases, 5 reviews, 167 PRs in 1 year 8 months
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