Joel Nowak
Member at Various Companies
New York City Metropolitan Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJoel Nowak is a cancer non-profit founder, advocate, and strategist with 14+ years of experience building programs that move patients from diagnosis to empowerment. He leads Cancer ABCs and serves as a founding member of Columbia’s Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center while advising clinical trial design through the Prostate Cancer Clinical Trials Consortium. A seasoned fundraiser, administrator, educator and former corporate president, he combines policy-level advocacy (testimony to FDA, CMS and Congress) with hands-on program design and survivor mentorship. He also contributes technical oversight to genomic data projects as a back-end developer and QA engineer on high-profile open-source tools like Picard and htsjdk, improving CRAM/VCF handling and multithreaded stability. Joel’s background in social work and higher education administration informs a rare blend of clinical perspective, community organizing, and data-savvy problem solving. He is known for turning near-bankrupt operations into sustainable organizations and creating actionable patient-led advocacy networks.
14 years of coding experience
BA, Psychology, BA, Psychology at Clark UniversityMaster of Social Work - MSW, Master of Social Work - MSW at University of MichiganMaster’s Degree, Adult and Higher Education Administration, Master’s Degree, Adult and Higher Education Administration at Teachers College, Columbia University
Github Skills (13)
unit-testing10
bioinformatics10
javas10
java-api10
ram10
genomics10
vcf-files10
java10
bam9
data-structures8
data-structure8
algorithms7
build-automation6
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
samtools/htsjdk
Oct 2018 - May 2019
A Java API for high-throughput sequencing data (HTS) formats.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:48 commits, 46 PRs, 208 pushes in 7 months
Contributions summary:Joel primarily contributed to improving the testing of the htsjdk Java API, with a focus on the CRAM format. They added and expanded unit tests, including CRAM compliance tests. The commits involved refactoring CRAM encoding and decoding code, as well as making fixes for specific classes within the library. The user demonstrates a strong understanding of the CRAM data format and related technologies.
sequencednabamcramsequencing-data
broadinstitute/picard
Feb 2014 - Apr 2014
A set of command line tools (in Java) for manipulating high-throughput sequencing (HTS) data and formats such as SAM/BAM/CRAM and VCF.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & QA Engineer
Back-end Developer & QA EngineerContributions:13 commits, 1 comment, 7 issues in 2 months
Contributions summary:Joel primarily focused on improving the stability and correctness of the `picard` library. Their contributions include fixing race conditions in multithreaded code, and ensuring proper handling and ordering of alleles within the VariantContext. They also added unit tests and refactored code to improve the robustness of the library, particularly around handling of variant contexts and indices. The user also contributed to the build process and file handling.
sequencebamcramcommand-line-toolsfasta
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