Imogen Wright is a

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. Its Provinces of South Africa, nine provinces are bounded to the south by of coastline that stretches along the Atlantic O ...

software developer Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...

and bioinformatician. They are

co-founder An organizational founder is a person who has undertaken some or all of the formational work needed to create a new organization, whether it is a business, a charitable organization, a governing body, a school, a group of entertainers, or any oth ...

and CTO of Hyrax Biosciences, a software development company specialising in

DNA analysis Genetic testing, also known as DNA testing, is used to identify changes in DNA sequence or chromosome structure. Genetic testing can also include measuring the results of genetic changes, such as RNA analysis as an output of gene expression, or ...

programs.

Education

They earned a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, B.S., B.Sc., SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree that is awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Scienc ...

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

and

Physics Physics is the scientific study of matter, its Elementary particle, fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge whi ...

Rhodes University Rhodes University () is a public research university located in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown) in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. It is one of four universities in the province. Established in 1904, Rhodes University is the prov ...

. They then earned a

Master of Science A Master of Science (; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree. In contrast to the Master of Arts degree, the Master of Science degree is typically granted for studies in sciences, engineering and medici ...

Theoretical Physics Theoretical physics is a branch of physics that employs mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems to rationalize, explain, and predict List of natural phenomena, natural phenomena. This is in contrast to experimental p ...

at the Perimeter Institute in Canada. In 2015 the also earned a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in Bioinformatics from the University of Western Cape.

Career

In the past Wright has worked for

Skimlinks Skimlinks is a content monetisation platform for online publishers (including editorial sites, forums, bloggers, social networks, and app developers). It specializes in automatically generating affiliate product links from content creators' co ...

. They were senior software developer and team leader at the

big data Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...

startup A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to ...

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

. Wright also worked for the

Amazon EC2 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of ap ...

compute team as a software development engineer. They were a UWC-SANBI (

University of the Western Cape The University of the Western Cape (UWC; ) is a Public university, public research university in Bellville, South Africa, Bellville, near Cape Town, South Africa. The university was established in 1959 by the Politics of South Africa, South ...

’s South African Bioinformatics Institute) post-doctoral research fellow.

Awards

Wright was the 2016 runner-up for the Innovation Prize for Africa. They won the prize of $25,000 for Exatype, a piece of software developed by Hyrax Biosciences. Exatype is genotyping and drug-resistance testing software, initially used for

HIV-positive The human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) are two species of '' Lentivirus'' (a subgroup of retrovirus) that infect humans. Over time, they cause acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a condition in which progressive failure of the im ...

patients. They were also invited to, but did not attend, the five-week TechWoman program in 2016. From 2300 applicants they were one of 90 chosen. The program was started by former Secretary of State

Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton ( Rodham; born October 26, 1947) is an American politician, lawyer and diplomat. She was the 67th United States secretary of state in the administration of Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, a U.S. senator represent ...

in 2011.

Publications

* The Conversation: How South Africa can stop HIV drug resistance in its tracks (May 22, 2015) * Nucleic Acids Research: RAMICS: trainable, high-speed and biologically relevant alignment of high-throughput sequencing reads to coding DNA (May 26, 2014) * The Journal of Immunology: Ability To Develop Broadly Neutralizing HIV-1 Antibodies Is Not Restricted by the Germline Ig Gene Repertoire (April 17, 2015) * Google Scholar, patents: Testing the operation of an application programming interface (October 14, 2014) * Journal of Virology: Intact HIV Proviruses Persist in Children Seven to Nine Years after Initiation of Antiretroviral Therapy in the First Year of Life (31 January 2020) * Retrovirology: HIVIntact: a python-based tool for HIV-1 genome intactness inference (27 June 2021)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wright, Imogen University of the Western Cape alumni Rhodes University alumni Living people 1986 births