Christopher Saunders
Principal Scientist at PacBio
San Diego, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChristopher Saunders is a Principal Scientist with 22 years of experience applying computational biology and high-performance software engineering to turn sequencing and multi-omics assay data into clinically useful insights. Based in San Diego, he led development of signature tools and models at Illumina—helping integrate the open-source Manta structural-variant caller into the DRAGEN platform and contributing to Strelka2 and gVCF conventions—and now drives bioinformatics efforts at PacBio. His strengths span algorithm design, probabilistic models, and scalable C++/Python implementations for challenging problems like somatic and structural variant calling from FFPE, ctDNA and single-cell data. Known for bridging research and productization, he combines deep academic training (PhD, University of Washington) with pragmatic engineering that prioritizes accuracy and speed in diagnostics-grade pipelines. An oft-unnoticed thread in his work is consistently translating statistical innovations into production-ready, high-throughput tools used across clinical and research sequencing ecosystems.
22 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D. Molecular Biotechnology / Computational Biology Track, Ph.D. Molecular Biotechnology / Computational Biology Track at University of WashingtonB.S. with honors Physics, B.S. with honors Physics at Drexel University
Stackoverflow
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0reached
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Github Skills (12)
algorithm10
bioinformatics10
numerical-optimization10
code-optimization10
algorithms10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
variants10
optimisation10
optimization10
data-structure9
data-structures9
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
Illumina/manta
May 2013 - Jul 2019
Structural variant and indel caller for mapped sequencing data
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:26 releases, 2038 commits, 5 PRs in 6 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Christopher's commits primarily address the improvement of the Manta structural variant and indel caller's functionality. Their work focused on enhancing insert handling, specifically for non-shadow pair inserts, and optimizing the scoring of repeat chimera inserts. Additionally, the user implemented new diagnostic outputs and made changes to refine the algorithm's scoring mechanics.
indelsstructural-variationcallerrnaseqsequencing-data
Illumina/pyflow
May 2013 - Jul 2020
A lightweight parallel task engine
Contributions:17 releases, 143 commits, 3 PRs in 7 years 3 months
pipeline-frameworktask-parallelparallel
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