Maria Nattestad

I joined Google in 2019 as a Senior Software Engineer on the Genomics team in Health, where I’m currently working on the open source DeepVariant project. Before Google, I did a Ph.D. in genomics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, working with Mike Schatz on using long-read sequencing data to understand structural variation in cancer genomics. The challenges of that research led me to build specialized genomics visualization tools, something that has been a key aspect of my work ever since. I find that visualizing complex data in a way that makes it intuitive can quickly lead to new discoveries that were previously hiding in plain sight.