Jay Hesselberth
Co-Founder at University of Colorado School of Medicine
Denver, Colorado, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJay Hesselberth is a Professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine with 12 years of independent research leadership developing RNA technologies and therapies. He combines deep bench expertise in RNA damage and repair with computational tool-building, contributing to well-known open-source projects like Snakemake and pkgdown to streamline reproducible workflows and documentation. Trained with a Ph.D. in Chemistry and Biochemistry and a postdoc in Genome Sciences, he bridges molecular biology, bioinformatics, and software engineering to advance translational RNA approaches. His lab focuses on turning mechanistic insights about RNA integrity into practical therapeutics, and he frequently improves community tools to make complex analyses more robust and accessible. Based in Denver, he is noted for pragmatic engineering contributions—such as enriching Snakemake syntax and enhancing pkgdown vignette handling—that reveal a hands-on approach to both wet-lab and computational problems.
13 years of coding experience
Postdoc, Genome Sciences, Postdoc, Genome Sciences at University of WashingtonPh.D., Chemistry and Biochemistry, Ph.D., Chemistry and Biochemistry at The University of Texas at AustinB.S., Biochemistry, B.S., Biochemistry at University of Iowa
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (11)
markdown10
workflow-management10
markdown-it10
snakemake10
python10
documentation10
r10
vim9
html9
web-development8
css8
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
r-lib/pkgdown
Oct 2016 - Mar 2022
Generate static html documentation for an R package
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:74 reviews, 202 commits, 363 PRs in 5 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Jay primarily focused on improving the project's documentation generation process using the `pkgdown` tool. They added parameters for output file naming, and copied and built vignettes to improve documentation. Furthermore, they implemented the parsing of citation information and linked it from the home page. They also made updates and improvements to other areas of the documentation and site generation.
rr-packagestatic-htmldocumentation-tool
snakemake/snakemake
Jul 2015 - Jan 2016
This is the development home of the workflow management system Snakemake. For general information, see
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 commits in 6 months
Contributions summary:Jay's primary contributions focused on enhancing the Snakemake workflow management system, particularly by modifying the Vim syntax file to improve code highlighting and incorporating new features. These changes included adding keywords, making the loading of python settings more robust, and merging in other contributions. The user also added the missing `configfile` and `wrapper` keywords.
snakemakereproducibilityworkflow-management
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