Derrick Wood
Founder at Blackjack Biotechnologies
Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDerrick Wood is a computational biologist and founder with 12 years of experience building high-performance bioinformatics software and leading R&D teams to translate sequencing data into diagnostics and products. He architected and optimized foundational tools—most notably upgrading the Kraken taxonomic classifier to Kraken 2, cutting memory use by ~85% and boosting speed—which underpins much of modern metagenomic analysis. Derrick has driven machine-learning approaches that materially improved clinical variant calling (halving false negatives and reducing false discoveries by over 90%) and engineered pipelines that made complex workflows 10–100x faster without sacrificing accuracy. As a principal scientist and recent founder in Baltimore, he combines hands-on backend development with strategic product work across startups and industry leaders like Exact Sciences and Personal Genome Diagnostics. He also brings academic rigor from a CS PhD and a track record of mentoring students and interns while shipping production-grade open-source and proprietary systems.
12 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
University of Texas at San AntonioDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science at University of Maryland
Github Skills (12)
bioinformatics10
c-language10
taxonomy10
cprogramming-language10
perl9
bash9
algorithms8
data-structures8
algorithm8
data-structure8
makefile7
gnu-make7
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (3)
DerrickWood/kraken2
Jun 2018 - Jan 2023
The second version of the Kraken taxonomic sequence classification system
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 releases, 101 commits, 17 PRs in 4 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Derrick primarily contributed to the Kraken 2 taxonomic sequence classification system by making enhancements and fixes to the codebase. Their work included refactoring code, updating documentation, and fixing various bugs within the project. The user also added new features such as the deterministic build option and k-mer data reporting, along with improvements to the build process.
sequencebiodiversitybiologybioinformaticskraken
DerrickWood/kraken
Dec 2013 - Oct 2017
Kraken taxonomic sequence classification system
Contributions:3 releases, 102 commits, 6 PRs in 3 years 10 months
sequencebioinformaticskrakensequence-classificationtaxonomy
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.