Heather Ward
Staff Bioinformatics Analyst
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolHeather Ward is a Staff Bioinformatics Analyst with a decade of experience applying software engineering and scientific rigor to large-scale genomic data at DNAstack. She has progressed from intern to team lead, building reproducible, cloud-compatible pipelines that balance accuracy, runtime and cost while contributing to open-source bioinformatics tools and public databanks. Trained in biochemistry, evolutionary biology and bioinformatics, she bridges wet-lab insight with production-grade computational workflows to translate research protocols into scalable, containerized pipelines. Known for optimizing cross-cloud portability and delivering time-sensitive projects, she combines hands-on coding with strategic pipeline architecture to accelerate healthcare-relevant discovery.
10 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS Evolutionary Biology, Master of Science - MS Evolutionary Biology at Western UniversityMaster's degree Bioinformatics, Master's degree Bioinformatics at University of GuelphBachelor of Science - BS Biochemistry, Bachelor of Science - BS Biochemistry at University of Waterloo
Stackoverflow
81reputation
570reached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (69)
datasets10
transition10
aws10
bioinformatics10
reproducible-science9
mothur9
application9
cromwell9
wdl9
phylogeny8
scientific-workflow8
workflow-description-language8
genomics8
specification8
computational-science8
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
DNAstack/bioinformatics-public-docker-images
Jun 2023 - Mar 2025
Contributions:3 reviews, 1 PR, 3 pushes in 1 year 10 months
hkeward/phomemo_printer
Apr 2021 - Jan 2022
Python utilities to allow printing text from the phomemo printer
Contributions:2 releases, 8 commits, 9 pushes in 8 months
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