Tracy studied bioinformatics at UC Berkeley shortly after the human genome was first sequenced and assembled. After a stint as a data analyst at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center working on epigenetics and microarrays, she continued her education and earned a PhD from UC Santa Cruz in bioinformatics. There she studied retrotransposition and structural rearrangements in cancer evolution. She went abroad for a post doc and continued cancer genomics research at the Institute of Genetics and Cancer at the University of Edinburgh. At Rancho Biosciences, her favorite projects involve working in close collaboration with clients to do cutting edge research. She's an avid hiker and runner, and is learning how to fix up her cabin in the Redwoods.
We’re Rancho Biosciences. We were started twelve years ago by a few women just tinkering around in their garage… just kidding. They weren’t tinkering; they were going around talking to pharmaceutical companies and seeing what the brilliant scientists there were struggling with. What they saw was a lot of good data going to waste because it was too overwhelming or time-consuming for people to get to a useful state.
That’s where we at Rancho Biosciences come in. We will Marie Kondo your data, make it neat and tidy, so you can find the information you need from your data effortlessly. We do the dirty work – things like making sure all the gene annotations are consistent, age is represented in the same units, or gender is categorized as “Male/Female” instead of “M/F” or “Boomer/Doe”. We’re like librarians for biomedical data, knowing more than the average person probably wants to know about ontologies (hierarchical dictionaries for clinical and biological terms).
Some people might think this work seems tedious and boring, but we don’t. Sure, sometimes we can enter a meditative state while we look up the best official terms and codes for hundreds of cryptic disease names in the supplementary excel sheet of a valuable single-cell publication. But we also know that the devil is in the details, and we often have to snap out of that meditative state to research the best answer. This might mean reading the publication in-depth, researching the latest consensus on disease subtypes, or asking our clients what they think.
Although curation is our specialty and our roots, we also do bioinformatics, data science, and consulting. We build pipelines, help set up databases, build apps for data visualization, and do analysis. Whatever you need, we can do it, and if we can’t, we’ll activate our network to look for someone who can. For example, a recent company-wide e-mail was an urgent request for someone who could translate a scientific paper from Japanese to English – employee, family, or friend. No job is too small for us to want to help and no job too big for us to break down and take on as a team. Even our directors and VPs have been known to do the thankless task of QC or the menial work of mapping old file names to a new schema because a client needed it, and they were the ones available to do it. We truly care about our clients, and we invite you to join us as we carve out our place in the ever-evolving landscape of technology and biomedical research.