It was a chance conversation with a friend that led Katherine Chao to a career in computational biology. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences and spending a year teaching English in South Korea, Chao wasn’t sure what her next step would be. Her friend mentioned that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was looking for biologists who wanted to learn coding. Chao joined the NIH as a Post-Baccalaureate Intramural Research Training Award fellow, where she processed and analyzed genomic data in the context of rare disease.
After two years at the NIH, Chao landed at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she first worked as a clinical genomic variant analyst in the Center for Mendelian Genomics. In that role, Chao continued to work in rare disease genomic analysis, identifying sections of duplicated or deleted genomic sequences called copy number variants. She is now the product manager for the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD), a public database of human genetic variation with over 200,000 genome and exome sequences that researchers use to study the genetic basis of human disease.
