Billy Rowell

About Billy Rowell

Collaborative biological data scientist with over 25 years of research experience, including 10 years in genomics. Currently developing and applying variant calling applications and workflows for highly accurate long‐read sequencing data. Practical experience in genomics, human and model organism genetics, neurogenetics, and molecular biology.

Experience

1. Senior Staff Bioinformatics Scientist

   PacBio

   Feb 2017 — Present · San Francisco, CA, US

   Department: Computational Biology- Lead a small team focused on developing, improving, and applying analysis workflows to characterize genomics data- Developed and released HPC/multi-cloud workflows for variant calling, filtering, annotation, and prioritization for rare and inherited disease studies (HiFi-human-WGS-WDL, pb-human-wgs-workflow-snakemake, HiFi-human-assembly-WDL)- Worked alongside customers to apply long-read sequencing to rare disease research and identify candidate variation (Del Gobbo et al, 2023),(Mehinovic et al, 2022),(Cohen et al, 2022),(Laine et al, 2021),(Cook et al, 2020),(Tseng et al, 2019),(Cheung et al, 2022),(Kucuk et al, 2023).Worked within the NIST Genome in a Bottle consortium to improve human variant calling benchmarks (Wagner et al, 2022), including in MHC (Chin et al, 2020), and other challenging medically relevant regions (Wagner et al, 2022)- Through collaborations, guided the development and improvement of tools and applications for long-read sequencing data, e.g, HiFi WGS (Wenger et al, 2019), TRGT (Dolzhenko et al, 2024), HiPhase (Holt et al, 2024), DeepConsensus (Baid et al, 2022),(Belyaeva et al, 2022), DNAscope LongRead (Freed et al, 2022), and PGx analysis (van der Lee et al, 2022)- Support commercial teams by leveraging pilot experiments into sales and collateral- Present research at conferences or in webinars (presentations, posters), and train customers and internal teams on analysis workflows- Provide escalated customer support for complex data analysis and interpretation.

Education

• North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

  High School

• The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  Bachelor's Degree, Biology

• University of California, Berkeley

  Master's Degree, Molecular and Cell Biology

  2012

Skills

• Perl
• In Situ Hybridization
• Linux
• Bash
• Genomics
• Experimental Design
• Polymerase Chain Reaction (Pcr)
• High Throughput Screening
• Research
• Data Analysis
• Workflow Management
• Matlab
• Mysql
• Pcr
• Molecular Genetics
• Genetics
• Molecular Biology
• Project Management
• Python
• Computational Biology
• Assay Development
• Molecular Cloning
• Biochemistry
• Training