Eric Dawson
Co-Founder at Phileal
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolEric Dawson is a Cambridge Genetics PhD, entrepreneur, and HPC performance engineer who builds sovereign, sustainable AI and high-throughput bioinformatics infrastructure. As co-founder of EarthFrame and founder of Phileal, he combines hands-on accelerated computing with product leadership to deliver scalable workflows and custom genomics software. Previously at NVIDIA he architected massive-scale protein structure and single-cell training pipelines—authoring the BioNeMo SCDL package and BioNeMo NIMs for AlphaFold2, Boltz-2 and MMseqs2—and contributed to Parabricks. His research drove the largest genomic analysis of Chernobyl Tissue Bank samples and introduced faster structural-variation and HPV coinfection methods that advanced tools like the vg toolkit and vcflib. With 13 years of experience across viral, plant, animal and cancer genomics, he pairs deep domain expertise with practical engineering for production-grade scientific computing. Outside work he freelances as an artist and outdoor enthusiast, reflecting a multidisciplinary curiosity that informs his technical creativity.
12 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS), Biology, Honors, Bachelor of Science (BS), Biology, Honors at The University of Texas at AustinDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Genetics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Genetics at University of CambridgeCheyenne Mountain High School
English, Spanish
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (9)
data-structures10
algorithms10
genomics10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
data-structure10
graph-theory10
protobuffer9
protobuf9
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
vgteam/vg
Oct 2015 - Sep 2019
tools for working with genome variation graphs
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:773 commits, 46 PRs, 102 pushes in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Eric implemented changes to the graph data structure and algorithms used to process it. They worked on defining a general purpose class used for graph modifications, as well as methods used for managing the pathing within a graph. A number of changes also involved refactoring aspects of the graph representation to reflect data storage in proto format.
genomegenome-graphdnagenomicsbioinformatics
vcflib/vcflib
Nov 2015 - Sep 2018
C++ library and cmdline tools for parsing and manipulating VCF files with python and zig bindings
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:80 commits, 11 PRs, 7 comments in 2 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Eric's contributions primarily focused on modifying and extending the `Variant` class within the vcflib library, adding support for structural variant (SV) handling, including insertion (INS), deletion (DEL), and inversion (INV) types. They implemented methods to canonicalize SVs, ensuring they conform to a standard representation, which included handling external insertion sequences. Furthermore, the user refactored existing code to improve efficiency and added helper functions for SV length and type retrieval.
cppvariant-callingc-librarypython-bindingsgenotyping
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