Career Profile
I'm Will Rowe, a software engineer currently working at GRAIL in the UK engineering team. I mainly work on software for running our clinical trials but I also contribute to the machine learning classifier and bioinformatics pipeline teams.
I like to work on algorithmic bioinformatics and "big data" problems, developing algorithms for a range of applications and incorporating the latest advances in data sketching, machine learning and graph theory into my software and research portfolio. I apply my algorithmic work to biological problems, such as: featurisation of genetic markers for population screening, real-time genomic epidemiology of viral outbreaks, gene dynamics in the gut microbiome, and antimicrobial resistance gene surveillance.
Employment Record
Staff Software Engineer
2023 - presentGRAIL
Senior Software Engineer
2021 - 2023GRAIL
Postdoctoral Research Associate
2019 - 2021University of Birmingham, Institute of Microbiology and Infection
Visiting Scientist
2019 - 2021UK Research and Innovation, Science and Technology Facilities Council
Computational biologist
2017 - 2019UK Research and Innovation, Hartree Centre (IBM/Science and Technology Facilities Council)
Postdoctoral Research Associate
2016 - 2017University of Liverpool, Institute of Integrative Biology
Trainee Clinical Scientist
2015 - 2016National Health Service, Addenbrooke’s Hospital (Cambridge University Hospitals)
Skills & Strengths
Software, Papers & Funding
Software
groot
A resistome profiler for Graphing Resistance Out Of meTagenomes
genome-sketching
online notebooks for a review of genome sketching
hulk
Histosketching Using Little Kmers
nthash
Go implementation of ntHash
baby-groot
A dummer, smaller version of GROOT
banner
BANNER is a tool that lives inside HULK and aims to make sense of HULK sketches
gfa
A Go library for working with Graphical Fragment Assembly format
artic-tools
a set of tools for viral amplicon schemes
thor
drax
A pipeline for Detecting Resistome Associated taXa
stark
Sequence Transmission And Record Keeping
artic-pipeline-example
quick demo of the ARTIC pipeline
Selected Papers
5295 citations, h-index 20. Please click on the abstract links for more information. Data fetched from Semantic Scholar on 22.4.2026.
Teaching, Leadership & Speaking
Genomics Masters module
2016-2017Designed and taught content (lectures and workshops) for a module of the LIFE708 Masters degree at the University of Liverpool
Bioinformatics supervision
2016-2017Provided bioinformatic supervision for PhD students at the University of Liverpool
Bioinformatics workshops
2016-2018Organised and ran weekly bioinformatics workshops for the institute
HiPy
2016-2018Assisted at university-wide Python workshops as an instructor