Kathleen Tibbetts - Head Of Operations

Kathleen Tibbetts

Head Of Operations

Greater Boston United States

Join Prog.AI to see contacts

Summary

🤩

Rockstar

🎓

Top School

Kathleen Tibbetts is a people-first engineering leader with 11+ years building and scaling high-performing software and data engineering teams, most recently serving as Head of Operations at Layer Health. She spent over a decade at the Broad Institute rising from senior engineer to director-level roles where she led data sciences and genomics platform engineering, blending deep domain knowledge with operational rigor. Kathleen pairs hands-on backend development experience—contributing bug fixes and feature work to prominent open-source genomics tools like Picard and htsjdk—with a track record of creating accountable, mission-driven cultures. Her technical work shows attention to detail in critical sequencing-data handling (quality encoding, SAM/CRAM validation), reflecting an engineer who still digs into implementation challenges. Trained in the humanities with an A.B. and an MFA, she brings rare communication and storytelling strengths to technical leadership and product alignment. Colleagues rely on her to translate complex genomics engineering problems into pragmatic, team-scalable solutions.

11 years of coding experience

23 years of employment as a software developer

A.B., English, A.B., English at Dartmouth College

Master’s Degree, MFA in Writing (Poetry), Master’s Degree, MFA in Writing (Poetry) at Vermont College of Fine Arts

Github Skills (12)

bioinformatics10

javas10

java-api10

genomics10

cra10

bam10

java10

sequencing10

sam10

algorithms9

algorithm9

ram9

Programming languages (3)

JavaRScala

Github contributions (5)

broadinstitute/picard

Aug 2014 - Jan 2018

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

Contributions:48 commits, 33 PRs, 32 pushes in 3 years 5 months

Contributions summary:Kathleen primarily focused on modifying the `RevertSam` tool, which is part of the Picard suite for manipulating high-throughput sequencing data. Their contributions included fixing issues related to quality score encoding, especially when reverting SAM files and dealing with multiple read groups and ensuring correct handling of single-end data. Furthermore, the user addressed validation stringency and introduced changes to ensure the proper setting of various flags and attributes within the SAM records.

sequencebamcramcommand-line-toolsfasta

samtools/htsjdk

Aug 2014 - Jan 2016

A Java API for high-throughput sequencing data (HTS) formats.

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:11 commits, 2 PRs, 4 pushes in 1 year 5 months

Contributions summary:Kathleen primarily contributed to the `htsjdk` project by adding and modifying methods within the `QualityEncodingDetector` class to support the detection of quality formats from SAM records, particularly when iterating over them. The changes include adding methods to handle iterators and integrating the original quality scores. Further commits included fixes and merging of code from other branches, indicating responsibility for improving code quality and integrating changes. This work is focused on functionality related to reading and processing data from SAM files.

sequencednabamcramsequencing-data

Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.

Request Free Trial