Lance Parsons
Associate Director, Research Software Engineering
Trenton, New Jersey, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolLance Parsons is an Associate Director of Research Software Engineering at Princeton University with 15 years of experience bridging bioinformatics research and sustainable software practice. He leads and scales RSE teams, shepherding large sequencing and imaging projects while embedding CI, testing, and reproducible workflows into academic pipelines. A hands-on engineer comfortable in Python, R, Snakemake and Perl, Lance contributes to prominent open-source bioinformatics ecosystems like Galaxy and Bioconda, improving tool integration and build automation. He combines deep domain experience in NGS, LIMS and data management (HTSEQ, TraceBase) with community-building advocacy for research software engineers. Notably, his work spans full-stack tool maintenance—including front-end HTML fixes—and long-running institutional data repositories that keep complex research reproducible and accessible.
14 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
MS, Computer Science, MS, Computer Science at Arizona State UniversityBA, Biology, BA, Biology at Wesleyan University
Stackoverflow
81reputation
4kreached
3answers
2questions
Github Skills (24)
python10
package-management10
conda10
build-system10
bash10
automation10
bioinformatics10
automations10
wrapper10
html8
githubaction-workflow6
swing6
unicode6
java6
fonts6
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
galaxyproject/tools-iuc
Jun 2015 - Nov 2020
Tool Shed repositories maintained by the Intergalactic Utilities Commission
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:8 reviews, 114 commits, 53 PRs in 5 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Lance contributed to the `galaxyproject/tools-iuc` repository, focusing on the integration and maintenance of bioinformatics tools within the Galaxy framework. They added tool wrappers, updated existing tool versions, and addressed linting issues to improve code quality and best practices. Furthermore, the user demonstrates knowledge of front-end development by fixing HTML outputs.
intergalacticrepositoriesusegalaxywrapperscommission
bioconda/bioconda-recipes
Oct 2016 - Feb 2022
Conda recipes for the bioconda channel.
Role in this project:Automation Engineer / Build & Release Engineer
Automation Engineer / Build & Release EngineerContributions:38 commits, 44 PRs, 5 pushes in 5 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Lance primarily contributed to the automation and build processes within the repository. Their commits focused on updating build scripts, modifying build configurations, and integrating new tools. They made updates to recipes to include newer versions of software and fix build errors and updated software dependencies in the recipe files. The user also merged pull requests that involved build and test steps within the recipes.
recipescondabiocondabioinformaticspackage-management
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.