Ruben Valas

Ruben has over 20 years of experience analyzing genomic data and has worked as both a software engineer and a bioinformatics scientist for several biotechnology start-ups. He recently led the development of oligo design tools at Ionis Pharmaceuticals, designing antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) for hundreds of gene targets. He is passionate about designing OBMs that modulate gene activity with precise control. Caught between the computer science and biology departments at Carnegie Mellon University, an internship at the Human Genome Sequencing Center set his path to walk the line between those fields. His Ph.D. work at University of California San Diego was focused on integrating many different genomic data sources to understand the tree of life. His post-doctoral training at the J. Craig Venter Institute focused on using next-generation sequencing to analyze microbial ecosystems.