Christopher Saunders

Christopher Saunders has a diverse work experience spanning over two decades. Christopher is currently working as a Principal Scientist at PacBio since February 2022. Prior to this, they spent almost 14 years at Illumina, where they held the role of Assoc Principal Bioinformatics Scientist. During their tenure at Illumina, they established the Clinical Methods Research team and led the development of the DRAGEN-SV structural variant caller. Before joining Illumina, Christopher worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Howard Hughes Medical Institute and University of Washington. Christopher also served as a Visiting Scientist at SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline) for two years.

Christopher Saunders earned a Bachelor of Science with honors in Physics from Drexel University, where they studied from 1991 to 1996. Christopher later pursued a Ph.D. in Molecular Biotechnology/Computational Biology Track at the University of Washington, completing their studies from 2000 to 2007.