Henri-louis Girard
Principal Software Engineer at Ginkgo Bioworks
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolHenri-louis Girard is a Principal Software Engineer in Cambridge, MA with 11 years of experience building automation, instrumentation, and data pipelines that bridge material science and bioengineering. He has led architecture and delivery at scale—re-engineering protocol compilation services and scaling orchestration from tens to hundreds of instruments—while directing roadmaps that align product, science, and operations. Trained as a mechanical engineer with a PhD from MIT, he pairs deep experimental expertise in surface chemistry and protein crystallization with hands-on software skills, having released multiple open-source Python packages and contributed fixes to the widely used pymeasure instrument library. He designs custom hardware and automation to generate statistically significant datasets, and applies image segmentation and machine learning to extract biologically meaningful trends. Formerly a naval officer responsible for team leadership at sea, he brings disciplined operational thinking to high-throughput lab engineering. His work uniquely combines wet-lab experimental design with production-grade software for autonomous laboratories.
11 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Mechanical Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Mechanical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyDiplome d'Ingénieur, M.Sc., Mechanical Engineering, Diplome d'Ingénieur, M.Sc., Mechanical Engineering at École PolytechniqueLycée Sainte-GenevièveUniversity of California, Los Angeles
English, French, German
Github Skills (7)
midi-instrument10
automation10
automations10
serial-communication10
python10
adapter9
adaptor9
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
pymeasure/pymeasure
Mar 2019 - Jul 2019
Scientific measurement library for instruments, experiments, and live-plotting
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 commits, 2 PRs, 12 comments in 4 months
Contributions summary:Henri-louis made several contributions to the pymeasure library, focusing on instrument control and adapter improvements. They added an option for custom serial timeouts in the Prologix adapter and updated the read command. Moreover, the user addressed bugs related to data handling in the Keithley 2450 instrument driver, including corrections to buffer operations and statistics calculations. These changes enhance the library's functionality and reliability for scientific measurement applications.
live-plottingpythonscienceplotmeasurement
hlgirard/xptools
Oct 2018 - Mar 2019
Tools to display images, detect particles, bubbles and crystals and analyze their shape, size and distibution.
Contributions:1 release, 67 commits, 10 PRs in 4 months
pythonparticlescrystalsbubblesdetect
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