Clay McLeod

Director of Product Development and Engineering at St. Jude building the pediatric cancer data ecosystem, St. Jude Cloud (

[Clay McLeod @claylmcleod]

I've been doing some work on foundational abstractions regarding coordinate systems, variation representation, and other data structures for the Rust bioinformatics ecosystem. I finally found some time to write down what I've been doing and why.

https://t.co/OdJphLyfg3

[Clay McLeod @claylmcleod]

Hi folks,

The recent release of the https://t.co/g0yq63yyZ2 manifesto left me with mixed emotions. I took some time to parse through how I was feeling and ended up writing a blog post. Check it out!

https://t.co/ud2kxTtjHL

[Clay McLeod @claylmcleod]

9/ Thanks to all of the individuals who participated on our Biohackathon team (Kevin Benton, Suchitra Chavan, Braden Everson, Andrew Frantz, Michael Gattas, Peter Huene, and John McGuigan)!

[Clay McLeod @claylmcleod]

1/ Hey folks! I'd like to more formally introduce and talk about a few of the projects we're working on towards improving large-scale bioinformatics analyses (one of which was developed during St. Jude's KIDS24 Biohackathon)!

[Clay McLeod @claylmcleod]

8/ As I said earlier, our team is really focused on WDL specifically, so we're going to continue building out a "head unit" for Crankshaft using WDL. That being said, I would love to see other community projects popping up and using the core machinery for other workflow langs.

[Clay McLeod @claylmcleod]

@nomad421 Does this mean Salmon has a Rust rewrite in its future 😏?

[Clay McLeod @claylmcleod]

3/ If you're interested in being a part of this awesome event (either in-person, which awards are available for, or virtually), please register here: https://t.co/BIoCiiluU3!

[Clay McLeod @claylmcleod]

1/ Hi everyone! St. Jude is hosting its third annual BioHackathon this year from September 4-6, 2024. There are a number of great ideas that have been submitted (https://t.co/CLNs2z1N2Y).

[Clay McLeod @claylmcleod]

2/ This is my first year participating, and I'll be helping lead a couple of the ideas I submitted around improving the genomics foundation we're building in Rust.

[𝕐 @nomad421]

For folks processing SAM/BAM files in Rust, this is a huge day :). The unification of SAM/BAM reading has been implemented in the excellent noodles library (https://t.co/gzsSrgOSeE), addressing one of the last remaining usability pain points of this excellent lib! cc @vsbuffalo

[Vince Buffalo @vsbuffalo]

A nice addition to the powerful Noodles library for working with bioinformatics formats in Rust: unification of SAM/BAM interfaces through a new trait!

IMO, trait-based languages fit scientific software development better than other OOP designs — a topic for a later thread.

[Clay McLeod @claylmcleod]

Hi everyone! Recently, I've gotten interested in the evaluation of non-cryptographic hashing algorithms. I went a bit overboard and designed my own hash evaluation framework in Rust. If you design hash functions, check it out!

https://t.co/3F3qI4zyiQ

[Clay McLeod @claylmcleod]

3/ Please apply if you're interested!

- Principal Software Engineer: https://t.co/EynlhyMeim
- Senior Staff Software Engineer: https://t.co/XXNvrrqOGy
- Staff Software Engineer: https://t.co/nYP9SdSl0n

[Clay McLeod @claylmcleod]

1/ Hey folks! I'm hiring a team of Rust engineers to work on a new project here at St. Jude: rebuilding the foundations of the genomics ecosystem in Rust.

[Clay McLeod @claylmcleod]

2/ These positions are focused on high-performance algorithm and data structure development using Rust. No formal genomics or bioinformatics experience is required—we're targeting talented software engineers who are interested in genomics.