Joel Rodriguez Medina

Bioinformatics, Algorithms, Data Analysis, Science, and Statistics



My name is Joel (pronounced /xo'el/) and I am passionate about implementing computational solutions to solve complex biological challenges.

🌱 During my PhD I studied how plants adapt their genomic expression in response to environmental changes.

🤖 In 2020, I was a Health Data Science fellow at Insight Data Science, where I developed SuppSmart, a Natural Language Processing (NLP) based recommendation engine. This system suggests dietary supplements based on user queries, utilizing a dataset I curated from various online sources. I built the application by training a word2vec model from the ground up. Explore the app here and the repository here

🫐 I subsequently joined Foodome/Naring Health, focusing on identifying natural compounds in plants that could potentially treat diseases through a Network Medicine approach. The company was later acquired by Viome.Inc.

🧪 I returned to genomics at Freenome, where I applied computational biology methods to cfDNA analysis, contributing to the development of novel assays for early colorectal cancer detection.

🧬 Currently I'm at Natera , where I continue to leverage computational tools and data to drive innovations in personalized medicine, with a focus on liquid biopsies and early cancer detection.