Samuel Shepard is a Health Scientist in Informatics with eight years at the CDC, applying computational biology, phylogenetics, and deep sequencing analysis to strengthen public health surveillance. He combines rigorous academic training (PhD in Biomedical Science, certificates in bioinformatics/proteomics) with production-grade software skills across Rust, C/C++, Java/Scala, Python/R, and distributed analytics on Spark and Impala. Samuel’s work spans end-to-end pipelines—from database schema and Linux administration to machine-learning and data visualization—enabling practical genomic insights for outbreak response. He also contributes to core systems-level open source, notably enhancing SIMD and mask operations in the Rust core library, reflecting a focus on performance and low-level optimization that’s uncommon in public health informatics. Based in Atlanta, he bridges research and operational deployment to turn complex sequence data into actionable public-health intelligence.
8 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
M.S. & M.A., Computer Science & Applied Math, M.S. & M.A., Computer Science & Applied Math at Bowling Green State University
PhD, Biomedical Science, PhD, Biomedical Science at The University of Toledo
BA, Computer Science, BA, Computer Science at Bluffton University
Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:1 comment in 1 day
Contributions summary:Samuel primarily focused on implementing new functionalities related to SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) and mask operations within the Rust core library. They added new functions to shift vector and mask elements, including left and right shifts, and modified APIs to accept a padding argument for these operations. These changes included implementing these methods for both vectors and masks, and incorporating tests to validate their functionality, demonstrating a focus on core library development and optimization.
Contributions:1 review, 2 PRs, 18 pushes in 2 years 8 months
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