Derek Croote
Co-founder & Chief Technical Officer at IgGenix, Inc
South San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDerek Croote is a biotech entrepreneur and technical CTO with a decade of experience translating academic discovery into commercial therapeutics, most notably helping advance IgGenix’s internally developed antibody IGNX001 to first-in-human dosing within five years. He blends hands-on bioinformatics, AI pipeline development, and lab operations oversight with executive responsibilities in strategy, fundraising (helping raise >$60M), IP generation, and scientific communication. Trained as a Stanford PhD in bioengineering, Derek also contributes to prominent open-source bioinformatics projects—improving Snakemake docs and cloud integrations and bolstering rust-bio test coverage—demonstrating his fluency across wet lab, cloud, and software engineering. He routinely bridges academic collaborations, CRO management, and product-focused startups, and has a knack for turning complex molecular workflows into reproducible, cloud-native pipelines.
10 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS), Biomedical/Medical Engineering, Bachelor of Science (BS), Biomedical/Medical Engineering at Brown UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (PhD), Bioengineering, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Bioengineering at Stanford University
Stackoverflow
106reputation
10kreached
3answers
0questions
Github Skills (19)
python10
testing10
bioinformatics10
workflow-management10
rust10
documentation10
test-automation10
kubernetes9
gcp9
software-quality9
kubernetes-pods9
conda8
dockers7
docker7
pandas6
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
rust-bio/rust-bio
Jan 2019 - Dec 2022
This library provides implementations of many algorithms and data structures that are useful for bioinformatics. All provided implementations are rigorously tested via continuous integration.
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:28 reviews, 19 commits, 27 PRs in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Derek primarily contributed to the project by writing tests. They added new tests for algorithms related to GC content, ORF finding, and pattern matching, significantly increasing the test coverage. The user also fixed compilation issues related to benchmarking and applied clippy lints, improving code quality and adherence to coding standards. Furthermore, the user added various tests to increase coverage across different modules.
bioinformaticscontinuous-integrationdata-structuredata-structures
snakemake/snakemake
May 2020 - Nov 2020
This is the development home of the workflow management system Snakemake. For general information, see
Role in this project:Technical Writer & DevOps Engineer
Technical Writer & DevOps EngineerContributions:10 commits, 14 PRs, 21 comments in 5 months
Contributions summary:Derek primarily contributed to improving the documentation and ensuring the correct use of cloud services and environment variables within the Snakemake workflow management system. They fixed formatting and links in various documentation sections, especially relating to Google Cloud Life Sciences and Kubernetes. Additionally, they updated installation instructions and command examples, and made adjustments to better integrate with tools like Conda. The user also addressed compatibility issues and improved the build process.
snakemakereproducibilityworkflow-management
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