Very few of us can say that our careers span continents, species, and millennia but Brandi Cantarel, Associate Director of Bioinformatics at Colossal Biosciences, can. For over 15 years, Brandi has been involved in projects that utilize sequence technology to understand human health, often at the forefront of an emerging field or technology. She leads bioinformatics development of next-generation sequence (NGS) data, including genomics, transcriptomics, and metagenomics in rare/complex genetic diseases, immunology, infectious disease, and cancer. She has applied precision medicine research in a CAP/CLIA setting, with the development of tools for tumor mutational profiling. Prior, Brandi was a faculty member at the UT Southwestern Medical Center, Department of Bioinformatics, and at the University of Maryland, Institute for Genome Sciences. In 2020, Brandi was named a Highly Cited Researcher by Web of Science.
In today’s episode, we talk about academia from a non-tenure-track perspective, working towards creating a mammoth-elephant hybrid animal, and the nontraditional and awesome ways that biotech startups tackle critical problems with global impact like fighting climate change. (Hint: We say screw it, let’s bring back the mammoth and see what works.) Her advice for our listeners? Focus on the science, raise your voice when you feel like it’s being done incorrectly, and hire people that are better than you and let them shine. And always be kind to people.
We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did!
*Disclaimer (27:15): The oldest sequencable DNA is1M year old, not 10K years old. This is not as far back at the mass extinction of dinosaurs (~66 million years).
