Jessica Parks

Jessica Parks has a wealth of experience in data engineering and scientific research, beginning with their undergraduate research assistant role at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2011 to 2013. During this time, they were awarded the UNC-HHMI Future Scientists and Clinicians Fellowship for two summers, and performed a forward genetic screen to isolate multiple chemically-induced mutations in C. elegans.

From 2013 to 2021, Parks worked at AgBiome as a Data Scientist and Engineer, and a Research Associate. During this time, they led several development cycles to modernize the company's pesticidal protein discovery platform, and provided data and guidance for prioritization of the proteins in lab assays. Jessica also engineered multiple aspects of the company's data platform, using AWS tools such as CloudFormation, ECR, S3, Batch, Glue, Crawlers, Lambda, Athena, and Step Functions. Additionally, they identified candidate pesticidal proteins from microbial genomes and developed a Python workflow to prepare the resulting data for patent filing.

In 2020, Parks acted as a Student Consultant and Graduate Research Assistant at North Carolina State University, where they compiled a data set from 20+ Ribo-seq projects and built a pipeline to process this sequencing data on a Slurm HPC cluster using Singularity containers and Snakemake.

Currently, Parks is a Senior Data Engineer, Computational Biology at ProFound Therapeutics.

Jessica Parks obtained a Bachelor of Science (BS) degree in Chemistry and Biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill between 2009 and 2013. Jessica then went on to earn a Master's degree in Bioinformatics from North Carolina State University between 2019 and 2020. Additionally, they have obtained three certifications from Amazon Web Services (AWS): AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (November 2020), AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (August 2022), and AWS Certified Developer - Associate (June 2021).