Kevin Jacobs
Ann Arbor & SF Bay area, United States
Summary
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RockstarKevin Jacobs is a senior software engineering leader with 16 years of experience building teams and computational methods that apply statistical and deep-learning approaches to large-scale molecular and imaging datasets. As Sr. Director of Software Engineering at DELFI Diagnostics and founder/advisor to multiple life-science startups, he blends hands-on engineering with strategic R&D leadership across diagnostics, genomics, and single-cell imaging. His background spans industry and government labs—from directing bioinformatics at Helix and 23andMe to leading cancer genomics informatics at the NCI—demonstrating a rare mix of operational leadership and deep domain expertise. Kevin is an active contributor to bioinformatics open-source, notably improving core functionality and performance in the widely used pysam genomics library. He habitually translates research methods into production-grade pipelines, emphasizing robustness, performance, and reproducibility. Based in Greater Cleveland, he combines entrepreneurial initiative with practical engineering rigor to accelerate translational biology.
16 years of coding experience
Github Skills (13)
bioinformatics10
htslib10
python10
bam10
cython10
vcf-files9
c119
ng9
c179
data-structures8
data-structure8
c-language6
cprogramming-language6
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
pysam-developers/pysam
Aug 2010 - Dec 2017
Pysam is a Python package for reading, manipulating, and writing genomics data such as SAM/BAM/CRAM and VCF/BCF files. It's a lightweight wrapper of the HTSlib API, the same one that powers samtools, bcftools, and tabix.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 124 commits, 59 PRs in 7 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Kevin primarily contributed to the `pysam` library, focusing on core functionality related to reading, writing, and manipulating genomics data. They made significant improvements in exception handling, boundary value checks, and data comparison within the `csamtools.pyx` module. Furthermore, the user implemented optimizations and refactored code to improve performance and memory allocation, especially related to the handling of the AlignedRead objects, and refactoring in iteration.
bcftoolshtslibpysampythonsamtools
bioinformed/vgraph
May 2015 - Aug 2019
vgraph is a command line application and Python library to compare genetic variants using variant graphs. ``vgraph`` utilizes a graph representation of genomic variants in to precisely compare complex variants that are refractory to comparison by conventional comparison methods.
Contributions:61 commits, 32 PRs, 59 pushes in 4 years 4 months
command-linegraphpython
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