Samuel Shepard
Health Scientist, Informatics
Atlanta, Georgia, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolSamuel Shepard is a Health Scientist in Informatics with eight years at the CDC, applying computational biology, phylogenetics, and deep sequencing analysis to strengthen public health surveillance. He combines rigorous academic training (PhD in Biomedical Science, certificates in bioinformatics/proteomics) with production-grade software skills across Rust, C/C++, Java/Scala, Python/R, and distributed analytics on Spark and Impala. Samuel’s work spans end-to-end pipelines—from database schema and Linux administration to machine-learning and data visualization—enabling practical genomic insights for outbreak response. He also contributes to core systems-level open source, notably enhancing SIMD and mask operations in the Rust core library, reflecting a focus on performance and low-level optimization that’s uncommon in public health informatics. Based in Atlanta, he bridges research and operational deployment to turn complex sequence data into actionable public-health intelligence.
8 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
M.S. & M.A., Computer Science & Applied Math, M.S. & M.A., Computer Science & Applied Math at Bowling Green State UniversityPhD, Biomedical Science, PhD, Biomedical Science at The University of ToledoBA, Computer Science, BA, Computer Science at Bluffton University
English, Spanish
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (10)
compiler10
simd10
lang10
compiler-compiler10
rust10
testing9
algorithms8
data-structures8
algorithm8
data-structure8
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
rust-lang/rust
Feb 2024 - Jun 2025
Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 comments in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Samuel primarily focused on implementing new functionalities related to SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) and mask operations within the Rust core library. They added new functions to shift vector and mask elements, including left and right shifts, and modified APIs to accept a padding argument for these operations. These changes included implementing these methods for both vectors and masks, and incorporating tests to validate their functionality, demonstrating a focus on core library development and optimization.
crategarbage-collectionrustreliablecompiler
CDCgov/zoe
Feb 2025 - Jul 2026
Zoe provides both broad and highly specialized implementations for bioinformatics. In particular, we focus on common data formats and methods relevant for the sequencing of RNA viruses.
Contributions:2 PRs, 169 pushes, 5 branches in 1 year 5 months
bioinformaticscommon-data-formatsequencingcdc-influenza-divisionncird-id
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