Sidney Bell
Staff Data Scientist Computational Biologist
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSidney Bell is a Staff Data Scientist and Computational Biologist with a decade of experience designing software that turns complex biological data into actionable insights for both experts and non-experts. Based in San Francisco and holding a PhD in virus evolution and immunity from the University of Washington, Sidney blends rigorous academic training with production-grade engineering at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. They are an active open-source contributor—helping improve Nextstrain’s SARS-CoV-2 pipeline and adding visualization and layout methods to cellxgene—bringing expertise in data engineering, full-stack development, and interactive visualization. Passionate about open science and equity, Sidney prioritizes reproducibility and accessibility, and maintains a public portfolio of projects, code, papers, and talks that reflects a rare mix of domain depth and usability-focused tooling.
10 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) at University of WashingtonInternational Honors ProgramBachelor of Arts (B.A.), Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) at Vassar College
Github Skills (24)
data-visualizations10
visualization10
snakemake10
data-pipelines10
python10
seq10
data-visualisation10
data-viz10
sc10
rna-seq10
bioinformatics10
data-visualization10
data-pipeline10
visualizations10
scanpy10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
chanzuckerberg/cellxgene
Aug 2018 - Mar 2020
An interactive explorer for single-cell transcriptomics data
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:43 commits, 43 PRs, 71 pushes in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Sidney primarily contributed to the front-end and back-end of the cellxgene project. They added support for new layout methods (diffmap and phate) and updated the scanpy version, indicating work on data visualization and the underlying data processing engine. Furthermore, the user implemented features related to percentile clipping of continuous values, integrating UI components and managing state within the application. They also updated the documentation and made changes to the CLI, thus working across the entire stack.
visualizationscrna-seqbioinformaticsscientificdataviz
nextstrain/ncov
Mar 2020 - Jan 2022
Nextstrain build for SARS-CoV-2
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Data Engineer
Back-end Developer & Data EngineerContributions:1 release, 4 reviews, 28 commits in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Sidney primarily contributed to the project by enhancing the data processing pipeline and configuring build configurations. They implemented features to integrate the pangolin lineage assignment tool, enabling more comprehensive sample classification. Moreover, they modified the build process, incorporating Nextclade for sequence alignment and quality control, which improved the diagnostic capabilities. They also added features for prioritizing subsampled data based on an external priorities file and surfaced the crowding penalty.
ncovnovel-coronavirussars-cov-2sars-covnextstrain
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