I want to give mad props to my team. Every day they handle new questions about obscure error messages or unusual experimental designs, on top of their ongoing efforts to develop new documentation materials and keep up with the latest innovations that the dev team is working on. All of this in service of a community with a very wide range of use cases -- and levels of comfort with the biology and/or computational aspects of genomics. It's a challenging job, especially when the tools and technology keep evolving under your feet, and the science itself refuses to stop mutating. Poetic, I suppose, if inconvenient.
And that's why we are a team with a wide range of strengths, backgrounds and interests as you can see in the 2017 team roster below.
So, please say hello in the comments if you appreciate this team's efforts, or really make our day and send us a postcard! One online commenter and one postcard sender will each be chosen at random* and receive a GATK-themed prize**.
Our mailing address is:
GATK Outreach, c/o G. Van der Auwera
Broad Institute, Room 415M-7100-B
415 Main Street,
Cambridge MA 02142
USA
* We reserve the right to implement random selection at our discretion. I expect it will be a low-tech implementation involving printing out bits of paper, folding them and having a random grad student in the cafeteria pick one out of a hat.
** Nature of prizes also to be determined as I need to find out how much of my outreach budget I can use for this. I can pretty much guarantee that the prizes will have no real monetary value, but will come with serious bragging rights.
| Kate V | |
 |
Kate Voss is the newest "Kate" to join the support team and if you think it's confusing for you, well it's confusing for us too. She comes from the tech world of startups and APIs, and her focus is on Cromwell and WDL. Kate is a native of the Boston area but regularly hops around the world for a few days or weeks at a time. Next destination: Cuba. |
| Kate N | |
 |
Kate Noblett studied biochemistry in the bitter, frozen tundra of Minnesota, with intention of going into cancer biology. However, she discovered her love for computer programming could be applied to her interest in biology. She joined the GATK support team in 2015, and continues to hone her skills in the technology half of biotechnology. |
| Soo Hee | |
 |
Soo Hee Lee (@shlee on the forum, not to be confused with @slee, i.e. Sam Lee the GATK developer) became interested in genomics after doing her 23andMe. She started writing about bioinformatics tools and data portals in 2014, in the Cancer Program at the Broad Institute and joined the GATK team in 2015. Previously, Soo Hee worked at the bench as a biochemist and earned her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. |
| Sheila | |
 |
Sheila Chandran has been with the team for almost 3 years as an associate computational biologist. She hopes you all know her from answering your forum questions about GATK tools; she looks forward to continue answering your GATK3 questions -- and move on to GATK4 questions in the coming months! |
| Geraldine | |
 |
Geraldine Van der Auwera is a lapsed microbiologist who believes that doing interesting science shouldn't require advanced computational expertise. She enjoys traveling the world for GATK workshops and delights in telling confused relatives that she tweets for a living. They probably think she's a travel blogger (but that's Kate V). She looks forward to the next step in her quixotic quest to get everyone in the world running GATK successfully, efficiently and at scale -- this time with WDL and Cromwell in the cloud. |