Chris Kachulis
Director, Computational Science
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Kachulis is a computational science leader with 8+ years translating physics-grade data analysis into production bioinformatics tools, now serving as Director of Computational Science at the Broad Institute. Trained as a physicist (PhD, Boston University), he built scalable C++ and ML-driven analysis pipelines for neutrino experiments before pivoting to genomics, contributing backend improvements to flagship open-source projects such as htsjdk, GATK and Picard. He combines hands-on engineering—writing codecs, IO utilities, and unit tests—with operational rigor in QA and variant/alignments tooling, ensuring reproducible handling of HTS formats. Colleagues rely on him to bridge deep algorithmic thinking with pragmatic software delivery across large collaborative teams. An underrated strength is his track record of porting and modernizing legacy genomics code while adding annotation and output features that improve downstream analysis.
7 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS), Physics, Bachelor of Science (BS), Physics at Yale UniversityDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Physics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Physics at Boston University
Github Skills (18)
genome10
bam10
testing10
cra10
java10
vcf-files10
sam10
genomes10
javas10
bioinformatics10
genomics10
gf9
biom9
ff9
gff9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
broadinstitute/gatk
Sep 2018 - Aug 2022
Official code repository for GATK versions 4 and up
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:14 reviews, 52 commits, 26 PRs in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Chris contributed to the development of the GATK (Genome Analysis Toolkit), a bioinformatics tool. Their work involved porting functionalities from older versions, such as the LeftAlignAndTrimVariants tool. They also implemented features to add annotations for alignment, callable regions, and supported alleles to BAM output. Furthermore, they modified the code to enable dropping specific annotation fields and to ensure correct sorting of variants.
genomesciencednaspark-mlngs
samtools/htsjdk
Jun 2018 - Sep 2020
A Java API for high-throughput sequencing data (HTS) formats.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 reviews, 7 commits, 6 PRs in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to the `htsjdk` Java API, implementing new functionalities and improving existing ones related to high-throughput sequencing data formats. Their work included adding unit tests for IOUtil, developing a new Gff3 Tribble Codec, adding options for hard clipping in CigarUtils, and making improvements to the existing Gff3 code. They also addressed issues by deprecating an unnecessary method and adding a Gff3 writer.
sequencednabamcramsequencing-data
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