About Ryan Bartelme
I am a full-stack data scientist working across bioinformatics, algorithms, scientific cloud infrastructure, and microbiology. My training started at the bench and ended up somewhere between the wet lab and the server rack.
I studied microbiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, then did a Ph.D. in Freshwater Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, in Ryan Newton's lab. For my dissertation I applied microbial ecology to aquaculture engineering problems: nitrogen removal in recirculating systems, and meta-analysis of microbial communities across system components and similar facilities. Recirculating aquaculture is sustainable food production, and that thread has run through most of my work since.
My first postdoc was with Paul Carini at the University of Arizona, doing the foundational engineering work on the humidity chambers behind his lab's bacterial desiccation experiments. Then Bryan Heidorn's group at the UofA College of Information, on AI, machine learning, and bioinformatics for phenotype forecasting in crops. After that CyVerse, on data science education and workshop programming for the USDA Agricultural Genome to Phenome Initiative (AG2PI). Then the private sector: computer vision algorithms for medical diagnostics, alongside the embedded systems people who had to run them on instruments. Then agricultural biotechnology, building bioinformatics pipelines in Nextflow and Julia, and leading cloud based genomic analysis platforms. Now I run Informatic Edge, LLC, building data foundations for research institutions and biotechnology companies.
The thread through all of it is that I keep having to make computational methods work in domains that do not share a vocabulary. Microbial ecology in fish tanks. Clinical diagnostics. Sustainable agriculture and agricultural genomics. Soil microbiome work and environmental monitoring. The statistics are often similar. The assumptions, the failure modes, and the words people use for them are not. Biological systems are messy, and most of the job is turning that mess into something that holds up under scrutiny. That spread shows up in the citations, where my work gets picked up across microbiology, ecology, bioinformatics, and environmental engineering, and in client work since going independent, which runs across biotech, ag-tech, climate-tech, and environmental. Being fluent in several at once turns out to be the actual product. The full publication list is on my Google Scholar profile.
I am a polyglot programmer with a deep toolbox, which is a position I have argued for at length. Day to day that is Python, R, Rust, Julia, and Elixir with Phoenix LiveView. SQL constantly, Postgres by preference, and DuckDB when the job is joining a pile of files against a real database. Nextflow for pipelines, AWS for the infrastructure underneath, and Docker and CI/CD running through most of what I build, professionally and otherwise. LiveView notwithstanding, please do not ask me to do web development. I wrote enough HTML as a kid to last a lifetime. I am always up for open source scientific software work, especially anything cross-disciplinary or aimed at making research reproducible.
Away from client work there is almost always at least one personal project going, and I am perpetually working through something in math or computer science. Otherwise you will find me spending time with my family, rock climbing, shooting analog photography, riding mountain bikes, or out hiking.
Work With Me
Consulting and contract work goes through Informatic Edge, LLC. Get in touch there about project based engagements.
For research collaborations, open source work, or questions about anything I have written here, reach out directly.