Ken Youens-Clark

Ken Youens-Clark is a Sr Scientific Programming working in a computational biology research group at the University of Arizona. He has worked as a software developer for 30 years in academia, research, and industry. Ken started in bioinformatics in 2001 at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory under the direction of Dr. Lincoln Stein, a prominent author of books and modules in Perl and an early advocate for open software, data, and science. Ken moved to University of Arizona, where he completed a MS in Biosystems Engineering in 2019. Ken's experience teaching and writing at UA led to his first book, Tiny Python Projects (Manning, 2020), which uses a test-driven development (TDD) approach to teaching Python. His second book, Mastering Python for Bioinformatics (O'Reilly, 2021), takes a similar approach to teaching how to use Python to solve common problems in scientific computing. His third book, Command-Line Rust (O'Reilly, 2022), applies TDD by rewriting common command-line Unix utilities in Rust. Ken worked as a Sr Solutions Engineer at DNAnexus, a commercial cloud-based bioinformatics platform, before returning to UA, where he contributes to the development of novel bioinformatics algorithms and data repositories.