Darren Platt
California, USA

Darren Platt PhD, has spent most of his working life on projects related to the Human Genome. His dissertation work in Computer Science was on physical genome mapping after a poorly labeled Petri dish became the decisive factor in his decision to pursue the computational side of biology. He spent 2 years at the Sanger Institute working on the early Human Sequencing efforts developing image processing algorithms, joined Exelixis as a founding member of the Computational Biology group which built a 1.5 million line software suite for gene discovery and analysis over 7 years. He then led a 65 person Bioinformatics team at the DOE's Joint Genome Institute where he developed novel methods for assembling DNA sequence from next generation sequencing technologies including a 38,000 year old Neanderthal sample and most recently worked with more modern DNA specimens at 23andMe where he was Senior Director of Research. He is currently consulting with various companies that are producers and consumers of DNA sequence.