Beatriz Saldana

Beatriz Saldana has over 8 years of work experience. Beatriz began their career in 2013 as a Research Assistant at the Self-Assembly in Biology and Origin of Life Laboratory and the Paleoecology Laboratory at the Florida Institute of Technology, where they prepared samples for charcoal, pollen, and sporormiella analysis and collected soil samples in Northern and Southern Mexico. In 2015, they worked as an Undergraduate Research Associate in Astrobiology at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where they prepared and analyzed sediment core samples from a Martian analog site using spectrometry and presented the data in a public NASA Astrobiology Institute colloquium. From 2017 to 2019, Saldana worked as a Graduate Research Assistant at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where they explored the relationship between ancestry, admixture, and the burden of inheritable disease. Since 2019, they have been employed at Cytel as a Software Engineer II, Analyst I, and Analyst II, where they have continued their responsibilities as a statistical genetics programmer/bioinformatician by processing and analyzing sequencing data. Additionally, they have developed custom dashboards in the Plotly Dash and R-Shiny frameworks for internal projects as well as genetics-specific client work and built and managed a database to serve as the back-end for one of the internal Plotly Dash dashboards. Most recently, they joined Cajal Neuroscience as a Software Engineer II in 2021.

Beatriz Saldana completed their Bachelor of Science (BS) in Astrobiology from the Florida Institute of Technology between 2012 and 2016. Beatriz then went on to pursue a Master of Science (M.S.) in Bioinformatics from the Georgia Institute of Technology between 2017 and 2018.