Lesther Ouma · Computational Biology & Software Engineering

About

Decoding biology through code.

As a Computer Science student minoring in Human Biology at Sattler College, I build the digital infrastructure that moves biomedical research forward.

I focus on bridging the gap between raw biological data and scientific discovery by engineering high-performance analysis pipelines, interactive visualization tools, and intelligent machine learning workflows. My approach combines rigorous software development with a deep respect for human biology, ensuring that complex datasets are not just processed, but made genuinely legible, predictive, and actionable for researchers. By integrating targeted AI models into scalable systems, I am dedicated to creating tools that solve hard problems and seamlessly integrate into the modern lab workflow.

EducationSattler College B.S. Computer Science · Minor, Human Biology

ResearchMassachusetts General Hospital Neurological research · data systems & pipelines

LabMind & Data Science Lab Data Science

Skills

A toolkit spanning two fields.

Engineering rigor applied to scientific questions, from raw signal to reproducible insight.

Engineering

Software & Systems

PythonJavaScriptSQL C / C++RGit LinuxDocker

Science

Computational Biology

BioinformaticsGenomicsImage Analysis scikit-imageOpenCVggplot2Matplotlib

Data

Analysis & ML

pandasNumPyscikit-learn D3.jsStatisticsPipelines

Experience

Roles & Responsibilities

Apr 2026 — Present

Student Council President

Sattler College · Boston, MA

Represent student interests to college administration and lead campus-wide governance — chairing council meetings, coordinating cross-departmental programs, and driving initiatives that shape the student experience.

LeadershipGovernanceCommunication

Jun 2025 — Mar 2026

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Mind & Data Science Lab · Massachusetts General Hospital

Built a cross-study gene expression portal in R/Shiny — enabling researchers to compare Alzheimer's disease vs. control conditions across 15+ independent datasets in a single interactive interface.

RShinyscRNA-seqAWSBioinformatics

2024 — Aug 2025

NeuroResearch Intern

Massachusetts General Hospital · Neurology Department

Designed and implemented a database management system for alumni records and supported team onboarding — building infrastructure that keeps research operations running smoothly behind the scenes.

PythonSQLDatabase DesignData Management

2024 — Present

Bioinformatics Research Collaborator

Local Laboratory Partnership · Boston, MA

Built a Python-based cell counting tool for time-lapse microscopy — automating analysis that previously required manual review, with accuracy tuned for real resource constraints in a working lab environment.

PythonPandasImage AnalysisOpenCV

2023 — Present

B.S. Computer Science · Minor, Human Biology

Sattler College · Boston, MA

Studying computer science alongside human biology — building the cross-disciplinary foundation to work fluently across software engineering and the life sciences.

AlgorithmsParallel SystemsGeneticsHuman Biology

Projects

Selected work.

Tools built to solve real problems in the lab — from microscopy to data infrastructure.

Interactive

Dunbar's Circles

An interactive visualization of Robin Dunbar's social brain hypothesis — map your own relationships into his five layers of intimacy and see how your circle compares to the theory.

JavaScriptSVGCSS

Data Visualization

Datalens Platform

Contributed to an interactive visualization platform at the Mind & Data Science Lab enabling researchers to explore complex behavioral and cognitive datasets through intuitive visual interfaces.

JavaScriptD3.jsPythonML

Image Analysis

Automated Cell-Counting Pipeline

Python pipeline for automated cell quantification across time-lapse microscopy stacks — labels regions, measures properties, and exports tidy per-frame counts for downstream analysis.

Pythonscikit-imagepandasNumPyOpenCV

Data Infrastructure

Neuro Alumni Database System

Structured database system for the MGH Neurology Department — turning scattered alumni records into a queryable, reproducible source of truth with automated reporting.

PythonSQLSchema Design

Bioinformatics

DNA Sequence Analyzer

Utilities for parsing and analyzing genomic sequence data — base composition, motif scanning and summary statistics. Built as part of CS50, packaged for reuse across projects.

PythonAlgorithmsGenomics

Research

Questions I'm chasing.

The most pressing challenges in biomedical research aren't purely biological or purely computational — they live in between. My research builds the infrastructure and tooling that lets scientists ask harder questions of their data.

01

Can we make reproducibility the default?

What does research infrastructure look like when data is organized, versioned, and queryable from the moment it's collected — not as an afterthought?

02

What can biology teach us about building better systems?

How do we translate the efficiency, resilience, and self-organization of biological systems into computational architectures and engineering design?

03

What does it look like when scientists drive their own analysis?

How do we build interfaces expressive enough that a researcher can explore a complex dataset end-to-end — without waiting on a software engineer?

04

What patterns in neurological data are we missing at scale?

As multi-study datasets in diseases like Alzheimer's grow, what computational approaches can surface cross-cohort signals that single-study analyses overlook?

Contact

Let's build something at the intersection.

Open to research opportunities, collaborations and software roles in computational biology and the life sciences.

Email[email protected] LinkedInin/lesther-ouma-102a312b6 GitHub@Takeya1