I’m Ryan Koehler, founder and principal of VerdAscend.
When people ask me What do you do?, I start out with this. I’m a computational scientist specializing in biotech R&D. I do bioinformatics, genomics, molecular design and data analysis, and I love all that stuff. I also develop software as needed to make things happen. I’ve worked at companies and startups focused on genetic analysis, medical diagnostics and drug discovery. I do consulting and contract work, and teach through UC San Diego extension. Always interested in new opportunities (so let me know)!
And if you want to hear more about me…
After grad school I worked as a computational chemist at a drug discovery startup. At the time Terrapin (later Telik) had an amazing set of protein-affinity data at the core of their affinity fingerprint technology. I did molecular modeling, docking and cheminformatics, helping development of an anti-cancer drug and resulting in several publications. Then I jumped from chemistry to bioinformatics and joined Applied Biosystems (ABI, now part of Life Technologies) when their bioinformatics effort was just starting. At ABI I developed software to automate assay design and analyze performance data. We went through the design-test-analyze-revise cycle multiple times for assay formats such as TaqMan, resulting in widespread use (and sales) of these technologies. Following ABI, I started VerdAscend and also started teaching ‘Bioinformatics’ and ‘Genomic Sequencing Technology’ courses with UCSD. After first consulting with the startup QuantaLife (later acquired by Bio-Rad), I was hired to work on droplet digital PCR optimization and applications. The ddPCR technology is amazing and it was really fun working on diverse applications for different labs. A number of publications have come out of ddPCR. Next, I joined startup TOMA Biosciences after working as a consultant. TOMA does NGS-based molecular diagnostics, primarily for cancer stratification, and I worked on probe / primer stuff as well as processing and modeling NGS data. A manuscript describing the TOMA technology is here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29354287
Even more stuff…
My formal education: B.S. in Biochemistry from the UC Davis, Ph.D. in Chemistry (organic / computational) UC Santa Cruz. I may work mainly in bioinformatics, and play with software all the time, but I’m a chemist at heart.
My professional profile is here: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryantkoehler.
Here’s a list of publications from Google Scholar.
And finally, here’s my_CV