Colin Brislawn
Freelance Data Scientist
Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolColin Brislawn is a freelance data scientist with 11 years of experience bridging computational biology, bioinformatics, and applied data science for academic, national lab, and commercial clients across the US and Europe. He previously led computational informatics work at Contamination Source Identification and spent multiple years as a computational biologist at PNNL, bringing hands-on experience in algorithm development and domain-specific analytics. Colin contributes to open-source bioinformatics tooling—most notably adding and validating diversity metrics like Pielou's Evenness to the widely used scikit-bio library—showing a blend of rigorous testing, documentation, and algorithmic correctness. His background in biology (BS, Juniata College) and early front-end/web work give him a practical, multidisciplinary approach to turning complex biological questions into reproducible code and analyses. Now taking new clients, he focuses on delivering interpretable, well-tested solutions that integrate research-grade methods into production or operational workflows. An understated strength is his track record of correcting subtle computational details (e.g., Shannon index base fixes) that materially improve downstream scientific results.
11 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS), Biology, Bachelor of Science (BS), Biology at Juniata College
Github Skills (6)
bioinformatics10
algorithms10
computational-biology10
python10
unit-testing9
numpy8
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
scikit-bio/scikit-bio
Aug 2015 - Sep 2015
scikit-bio: a community-driven Python library for bioinformatics, providing versatile data structures, algorithms and educational resources.
Role in this project:
Data Scientist / Bioinformatics Engineer
Data Scientist / Bioinformatics EngineerContributions:15 commits, 2 PRs, 25 comments in 13 days
Contributions summary:Colin primarily contributed to the development of bioinformatics algorithms within the scikit-bio library. Their work involved implementing and testing the Pielou's Evenness metric. The user also added unit tests and made documentation and formatting improvements related to the new functionality. Further changes include correcting the base used for calculating the Shannon index within the Pielou's Evenness metric.
scikitlicensedpythondata-sciencealgorithms-and-data-structures
CamerataMusica/website
Aug 2015 - Sep 2024
:musical_keyboard: :violin: Camerata Musica website
Contributions:2 reviews, 19 PRs, 604 pushes in 9 years 2 months
violinmusicajavascriptkeyboardmusical
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