Helena Rasche
Postdoctoral Researcher at Leiden University Medical Center
Randstad, Netherlands
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inComputational Genomics and Bioinformatics Workflow Development
Helena Rasche is a postdoctoral researcher and systems-minded software engineer with 14 years of experience building and scaling bioinformatics infrastructure across academia and open source. She combines backend and full-stack development with systems administration, having grown Galaxy services from hundreds to tens of thousands of users and contributed UI and backend enhancements to widely used tools like JBrowse and Galaxy. Her work spans reproducible scientific workflows, infrastructure automation (OpenStack/SURF integrations), and teaching—she’s developed and taught programming and bioinformatics courses while mentoring MSc projects. An active open-source contributor, she’s improved genome-visualization features, added format and CORS support, and authored documentation and conversion tools that ease community adoption. She also brings hands-on security curiosity from CTF writeups in cryptography and reverse engineering, a non-obvious blend that informs robust, production-ready tooling. Based in the Randstad, she holds a PhD in Bioinformatics and a background in biochemistry, bridging wet-lab context with scalable computational solutions.
14 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Bioinformatics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Bioinformatics at Erasmus MCBachelor of Science Biochemistry, Bachelor of Science Biochemistry at Texas A&M University
Github Skills (27)
javascript10
biom10
python10
css10
perl10
exploit10
fileio10
cryptography10
file-processing10
file-handling10
bioinformatics10
file-access10
reverse-engineering10
documentation10
co10
Programming languages (30)
Github contributions (5)
galaxyproject/tools-iuc
Feb 2015 - Dec 2022
Tool Shed repositories maintained by the Intergalactic Utilities Commission
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:62 reviews, 824 commits, 284 PRs in 7 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Helena primarily worked on updating and improving the JBrowse tool, focusing on functionalities related to visualizing genomic data. Their contributions include enabling color configuration options for bigwig tracks, adding support for multiple fasta files, and implementing a conversion tool for bcftools, which is part of the Galaxy platform and tools. These enhancements involved modifications to the core JBrowse code, addressing bug fixes, and refactoring components, demonstrating an understanding of the underlying architecture and integration with external tools.
intergalacticrepositoriesusegalaxywrapperscommission
shiltemann/CTF-writeups-public
Oct 2016 - May 2022
Writeups for infosec Capture the Flag events by team Galaxians
Role in this project:Security Engineer
Security EngineerContributions:178 commits, 5 pushes, 2 comments in 5 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Helena contributed several writeups for Capture the Flag (CTF) events. They focused on solving cryptography, reverse engineering, and web exploitation challenges, as indicated by scripts related to image steganography, ransomware analysis, and web application exploitation. Their contributions demonstrate an understanding of various security principles and practical application of tools in a CTF environment.
eventssecurityinfoseccapture-the-flagwriteups
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