Devin Strickland

Experience

• 

  University of Chicago

  May 2009 - Jun 2013

  American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow

  Developed a system of tunable, light-controlled interacting protein tags for pathbreaking optogenetic experiments in cell biology (TULIPs, Strickland et al. 2012)

• 

  Matrix Genetics

  Jul 2013 - Mar 2017

  Developed Cyanobacteria as a platform for manufacturing biofuels, biological, and high value chemicals. Led a group responsible for developing custom software and genetic engineering methods for a newly-isolated strain of cyanobacteriaPI for a successful application to the Department of Energy Productivity Enhanced Algae and ToolKits (PEAK) program (awarded to Lumen Bioscience)

  • Principal Scientist, Synthetic Biology

    Jan 2016 - Mar 2017

  • Scientist and Group Leader

    Jul 2013 - Dec 2015
• 

  University of Washington

  Jun 2017 - Jul 2021

  Project lead for DARPA Synergistic Discovery and Design (SD2) Program in Eric Klavins' Lab and UW BIOFAB. Improve reproducibility and transparency of experimental workflows and data collection to accelerate biological discovery using automation and AI. Oversee mixed wet lab and computational research team with $2M annual budget. Obtained ~$2M in supplemental funding for a project with a ~$6M baseline budget.Provided strategic leadership across multiple initiatives in a complex, four-year program with ~100 stakeholders in government, academia, and industry spread throughout the US. Made frequent written and verbal reports to the DARPA program manager and other collaborators.Developed human-centered automated experimental pipelines for accelerating biologics discovery. Wrote executable protocols as Ruby DSL code for a complex experimental pipeline including HTP library construction, yeast display, cell sorting, and next-generation sequencing. Led a team that delivered ~1 million new stability measurements of de novo designed proteins to train and refine ML models. Supported researchers from the UW Institute for Protein Design in developing novel therapeutics for flu, COVID, and type 1 diabetes. Collaborated with AI engineers in developing and interpreting models of biological systems including protein stability and yeast growth and cell division.Developed software for automated experimental planning and data retrieval in Python to enable parameterized planning of three-week experimental workflows in less than 10 minutes, and automated post-experiment data upload to cloud-based ETL services.Developed modular executable protocols for PCR-based COVID testing to enable flexible population monitoring in the face of shortages of specific reagents and consumables. Show less

  • Senior Research Scientist

    Oct 2019 - Jul 2021

  • Research Scientist

    Jun 2017 - Oct 2019
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  SingleStone

  Jul 2021 - Aug 2024

  Advise clients ranging from small startups to Fortune 100s on how to effectively implement human-centered analytics systems. Emphasis on mitigating technical and value risks, and on using AI to relieve bottlenecks in data and analytics workflows. Designed and built AI-based data quality and harmonization engine for a Fortune 500 insurer with an anticipated 260% ROI for identifying semantic conflicts among terms and definitions in a glossary with 900 terms.Designed and implemented high-performance graph-based operational data store for a Fortune 100 bank to enable flexible and low-latency feature retrieval over historical data in response to rapidly evolving security threats.Designed unified domain data model for clinical and bio-manufacturing operations to support CAR-T cancer therapy to enable rapid and flexible evolution of data systems in a high-stringency GMP environment. Built PySpark-based reconciliation and auditing software for an insurance client to automate regulatory reporting previously done in Excel. Show less

  • Senior Architect, AI and Analytics

    Jan 2024 - Aug 2024

  • Senior Data Engineer

    Jul 2021 - Dec 2023
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  Elucidata

  Dec 2024 - now

  Director of Solution Architecture