Chris Norman
Principal Software Engineer at Broad Institute
Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Norman is a Principal Software Engineer based in Massachusetts with 11 years of focused experience contributing to high-throughput sequencing tooling and long industry tenure dating back to the late 1980s. At the Broad Institute he drives backend engineering for flagship bioinformatics projects like Picard and GATK, modernizing Java codebases and improving robustness around CRAM/SAM/VCF handling. His contributions show a pragmatic eye for tooling and maintainability—migrating command-line parsers, adopting java.time, and introducing try-with-resources to reduce subtle bugs and resource leaks. Prior senior roles at Microsoft, The MathWorks, and other firms underscore his blend of architect-level thinking and hands-on implementation. He’s the sort of engineer who finds value in extracting reusable components and hardening validation paths, a behind-the-scenes builder who makes scientific software reliably production-ready.
11 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
BA Computer Science, BA Computer Science at UMass Boston
Github Skills (11)
bioinformatics10
javas10
command-line-interface10
ram10
bam10
java10
sam10
command-line10
resource-management9
data-validation9
computer-engineering8
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
broadinstitute/gatk
May 2015 - Jan 2023
Official code repository for GATK versions 4 and up
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 147 reviews, 611 commits in 7 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Chris's commits primarily focused on modernizing existing Java code by replacing legacy `java.util.Date` references with Java 8 abstractions from `java.time`. They also refactored code to use try-with-resources for resource management. Additionally, the user implemented functionality to enable setting validation stringency for reads data sources and modified the CompareSAMs tool to respect the validation stringency. The user's contributions were focused on improving code quality, maintainability, and data validation within the GATK framework.
genomesciencednaspark-mlngs
samtools/htsjdk
Sep 2015 - Nov 2022
A Java API for high-throughput sequencing data (HTS) formats.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:185 reviews, 282 commits, 147 PRs in 7 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily focused on fixing bugs and improving the handling of CRAM files. Their contributions include addressing issues in CRAM indexing, handling null SAMFileHeaders, improving CRAM iterator, and resolving MD5 validation failures. The user also made changes related to SAMRecord deepcopy and fixing bugs in index operations.
sequencednabamcramsequencing-data
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