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Roy Luo is a software engineer who currently works at Octant. Prior to working at Octant, Roy worked as a Senior Solutions Engineer at Zymergen, Inc. from November 2017 to September 2021. In their role at Zymergen, Roy collaborated with scientists, engineers, and RAs to better structure, manage, and analyze data. Roy also developed 30+ Python applications on rapid timelines to cover last-mile data management needs, prototypes/proof-of-concepts, and one-off software solutions. These applications reduced time spent managing data by up to 4 hours per user per week for each tool, while also enabling previously impossible workflows, structuring data more efficiently, and reducing manual errors.

In addition to developing applications, Roy also worked directly with end users throughout the product development lifecycle - gathering requirements, agreeing on a product design, incorporating feedback, implementing bug fixes and feature requests. Roy also created course materials and led training courses to educate scientists on applying Python, MySQL, and Github to their work. Around 50-100 employees took the courses, which allowed them to better investigate their own data and write their own processing scripts for simple tasks.

Roy also developed and organized various team-wide processes while they were at Zymergen. Roy authored the team charter; organized several team-wide code cleanup and documentation initiatives; developed framework for levels of software implementation of user requests. Roy also acted as liaison between end users and software teams: escalated potential technology gaps to software, handed off short-term solutions that needed to grow into full-production products.

Roy Luo's educational career includes a Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, as well as Bachelor of Arts degrees in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. Roy also holds certificates with honors from Coursera in Molecular Evolution (Bioinformatics IV), Comparing Genes, Proteins, and Genomes (Bioinformatics III), Genomic Data Science and Clustering (Bioinformatics V), Genome Sequencing (Bioinformatics II), and Finding Hidden Messages in DNA (Bioinformatics I).