George Young
Head Of Bioinformatics
United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolGeorge Young is Head of Bioinformatics with 11 years' experience bridging wet-lab biology and computational genomics, currently leading the Bioinformatics Facility at the Ellison Institute of Technology Oxford. He specialises in repetitive genomic elements, complex genomes, and novel sequencing technologies, delivering practical analyses and bespoke pipelines for bulk, single-cell and spatial multimodal data. A hands-on leader and *NIX/HPC administrator, he owns non-hardware cluster operations, software provisioning and user support while mentoring teams and collaborating on experimental design. He contributes to scientific computing open source—helping maintain bioinformatics packages in the widely used Spack package manager—ensuring tools like minimap2 and picard are up-to-date and reproducible. His background combines a PhD in Infection and Immunity with deep experience in retroviral and ERV biology, giving him unusual domain expertise in the evolution and functional impact of repetitive elements.
11 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts - BA (Hons), Biological Sciences, Bachelor of Arts - BA (Hons), Biological Sciences at University of OxfordThe Grammar School at LeedsUniversity College London
English
Github Skills (11)
bioinformatics10
biom10
build-system10
package-management10
scientific-computing10
python9
cmake8
makefile8
java7
javas7
openmpi6
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
spack/spack
May 2023 - Mar 2025
A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:78 reviews, 90 PRs, 138 comments in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:George primarily contributes to the Spack package manager by adding and updating package definitions. They are responsible for incorporating new versions of bioinformatics software packages, updating dependencies, and making necessary code adjustments to ensure compatibility within the Spack environment. The contributions focus on integrating tools like fastp, hyphy, minimap2, picard, and others, demonstrating a focus on the scientific computing domain and build process management. Their work includes adapting packages to evolving Java versions and build systems such as switching to MPI.
compilerspythonradiussplatformslinux
LMSBioinformatics/spack
May 2023 - Mar 2025
A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.
Contributions:172 pushes, 153 branches in 1 year 9 months
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