Martin Pollard
Technical Innovator
Greater Cambridge Area United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMartin Pollard is a Technical Innovator with 14 years of experience building robust, production-grade bioinformatics software and research infrastructure from the Greater Cambridge Area. At the Wellcome Sanger Institute he leads R&D into future computing strategies and previously developed high-throughput genomics pipelines and variant-calling tools for large cohorts and HLA research. A seasoned C back-end developer and active open-source contributor, he has made stability- and portability-focused fixes to foundational projects such as samtools/htslib and bwa-mem2, improving memory and IO safety in widely used sequencing toolchains. His background spans applied genetics (MSc) and a PhD in medicine from Cambridge, combining deep domain knowledge with practical software engineering to turn complex genomic problems into reliable tooling. Notably, his contributions emphasize defensive coding and legacy-compatibility improvements that reduce crashes and ease adoption across diverse compute environments.
14 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
BSc, Computer Science, 2.1, BSc, Computer Science, 2.1 at Royal Holloway, U. of LondonDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Medicine, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Medicine at University of CambridgeMSc, Genetics of Human Disease, MSc, Genetics of Human Disease at University College London, U. of London
Stackoverflow
16reputation
55reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (28)
c-language10
memory-management10
sequence-alignment10
c1110
c1710
htslib10
fileio10
file-handling10
file-processing10
bioinformatics10
file-access10
cprogramming-language10
data-structure9
algorithm9
algorithms9
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
samtools/samtools
Aug 2012 - Aug 2019
Tools (written in C using htslib) for manipulating next-generation sequencing data
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:164 commits, 29 PRs, 5 pushes in 7 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Martin primarily contributed to the `samtools/samtools` repository by making changes to the `razf.c`, `razf.h`, `razip.c`, and `knetfile.c` files. These changes involve modifying methods, method signatures, and fix for an issue where a variable used for `getopt` was being reused for a completely different purpose. The user also contributed to the `bcftools` and `bam_mate.c` files, refining functions and addressing issues related to data processing and file format handling.
next-generationsequencing-datanext-generation-sequencinggenomicssequencing
samtools/htslib
Sep 2012 - Jun 2022
C library for high-throughput sequencing data formats
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:28 commits, 14 PRs, 3 pushes in 9 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Martin primarily focused on fixing and improving the `htslib` library, a C library for handling high-throughput sequencing data formats. Their contributions included modifying function prototypes, ensuring portability by using `off_t` and `lseek`, and addressing signed/unsigned type mismatches. They also added documentation, improved the handling of legacy tabix indexes, and added functions for retrieving index statistics.
c-plus-plusbioinformaticsbamcramsequencing-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.