Imogen Wright is a

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring count ...

software developer Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development inv ...

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 othe ...

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, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...

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

and

Physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its 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 which rel ...

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

. They then earned a

Master of Science A Master of Science ( la, Magisterii Scientiae; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree in the field of science awarded by universities in many countries or a person holding such a degree. In contrast ...

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 natural phenomena. This is in contrast to experimental physics, which uses experi ...

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

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper ''Piled Higher and Deeper'' (also known as ''PhD Comics''), is a newsp ...

in Bioinformatics from the University of Western Cape.

Career

In the past Wright has worked for Skimlinks. They were senior software developer and team leader at the big data

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 refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend t ...

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

. Wright also worked for the

Amazon EC2 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon.com'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 o ...

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 research university in Bellville, near Cape Town, South Africa. The university was established in 1959 by the South African government as a university for Coloured people only. Other ...

’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 immune ...

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, diplomat, and former lawyer who served as the 67th United States Secretary of State for President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, as a United States senat ...

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