Ken Youens-Clark

Ken Youens-Clark works as a Data Engineer at The Critical Path Institute where he helps partners in industry, academia, and government find novel drug therapies for diseases ranging from cancer and tuberculosis to thousands of rare diseases. His career in bioinformatics began in 2001 when he joined a plant genomics project at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory under the direction of Dr. Lincoln Stein, a prominent author of books and modules in Perl and an early advocate for open software, data, and science. In 2014 Ken moved to Tucson, AZ, to work as a Senior Scientific Programmer at the University of Arizona where he completed a MS in Biosystems Engineering in 2019. While at UA, Ken enjoyed teaching programming and bioinformatics skills, and used some of those ideas in his first book, Tiny Python Projects (Manning, 2020), which uses a test-driven development approach to teaching Python.