Philip Garland
Adjunct Faculty - Annenberg School Of Communication
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolPhilip Garland is a quantitative communications researcher and data science leader with 15 years of experience bridging academic research, product analytics, and survey methodology. He has held senior roles from VP of Methodology at SurveyMonkey to VP of Data Science at Snap! Raise, cofounded a startup, and now teaches at USC Annenberg while advising organizations as a strategic methodologist. His open-source contributions to bioinformatics projects like khmer and Biopython show hands-on backend and QA chops—improving k-mer processing, test infrastructure, and machine-readable run summaries. Based in Seattle with a Stanford PhD, he combines rigorous statistical thinking with product-minded engineering to make large-scale measurement systems more reliable and sustainable. An uncommon blend of public-facing communication (TEDx, NYT citations) and deep technical craftsmanship makes him effective at translating complex methods into actionable insights.
15 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
M.A. Communication, M.A. Communication at University of WashingtonPh.D. Communication, Ph.D. Communication at Stanford University
Github Skills (11)
file-handling10
bioinformatics10
mer10
biopython10
python10
k10
testing10
sequence-alignment9
unit-testing9
hashtable8
command-line-interface7
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
biopython/biopython
Oct 2010 - Jun 2013
Official git repository for Biopython (originally converted from CVS)
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:24 commits, 2 comments, 1 issue in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Philip primarily focused on improving the testing infrastructure of the Biopython library. They corrected errors in existing tests, specifically addressing issues in BLAST-related tests and a spelling mistake. Furthermore, the user contributed to the testing framework by incorporating and fixing issues in the Bio.HMM module's testing, including modifications to the handling of probabilities. Finally, they updated test files to ensure compatibility with external services like NCBI.
git-repositoryphylogeneticspythondnagenomics
dib-lab/khmer
Nov 2014 - Dec 2014
In-memory nucleotide sequence k-mer counting, filtering, graph traversal and more
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 commits in 15 days
Contributions summary:Philip primarily contributed to the khmer library by improving code quality and adding functionality. They fixed a bug related to k-mer size limits, adding error handling to prevent the use of invalid sizes. The user also implemented a new function to check file writability and performed refactoring to improve code style and variable naming. In addition, the user integrated machine-readable run summaries in either JSON or TSV format, enhancing the tools usability.
memorysequencepythondnabioinformatics
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