Hi, I’m Michael. I started at the lab bench. Now I build software for biology and health data. This is how I got from one to the other
Bench First
I studied molecular biology at Newcastle University. I learned to work in a wet lab there. I planned experiments, ran them and wrote down every step. My final year thesis was a review of security in synthetic biology. It asked what new tools to edit life mean for safety
From Pipette To Python
Biology was turning into a data science. One sequencing run gives more data than a person can read by hand. So I stayed at Newcastle for an MSc in Bioinformatics. I wrote my first real programs there. I found that I liked to build the tools as much as I liked to use them
Biology At Scale
In 2017 I joined Zymergen in California as a bioinformatics engineer. I built AWS pipelines over one of the largest metagenomic databases in the world. My job was to turn what scientists asked for into software they could use. At Impossible Foods I built a Django app that moved the R&D teams from spreadsheets to one database. Now I am a senior full stack engineer at Profluent Bio in Berkeley. I build the systems that store and serve data for the machine learning, bioinformatics and biology teams. My resume has the details
Outside Work
I run, hike and camp. My half marathon PR is 1:21 at the 2026 Napa Valley half marathon. I have crossed Thorong La Pass (17,769 ft) on the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal. I have also climbed Mt Fuji (12,388 ft)
This site joins the two halves. My watches record each run and I build the dashboards that show the data. There is also a map of over 30,000 bioinformatics papers and a globe of the places I have been
