Meet Alison Meynert
Between the Lines of Code and Conversation
Alison joined Fulcrum Genomics in April 2024. Her professional expertise has focused on maximizing clinical impact with well-engineered workflows generating insights from ‘omics data. We recently sat down to chat about work and life as a bioinformatics consultant.
What’s your area of expertise, and what excites you about your work?
Alison: I come from an academic background, where I spent years working with very early-stage research and projects nowhere near therapeutic application. Moving to Fulcrum has been an interesting shift. The assays are much more defined, and each client typically focuses on just one or two. They know them inside out, and my role is to help analyze their data and build production-ready pipelines so they can bring their product to market. That’s a big change from academia, where you’re often helping define the assay itself, or juggling many different experiment types across multiple groups. At the Institute for Genetics and Cancer in Edinburgh, where I worked in a bioinformatics core, the remit was broad. It was mostly human-focused, or relevant model organisms, but still—there’s a lot you can do in that space. Our bioinformatics core partnered with the National Health Service in Scotland working on rare disease diagnostics for children and babies with very rare developmental disorders. That was another world altogether. There is no profit motive there, the margins are razor-thin, and you’re trying to do the best you can with publicly-available data. Working with the clinical side was what I enjoyed the most, and in some ways I think that’s what’s translated best to working with the Fulcrum clients. It’s one assay, it’s one focus, and some of our clients - well they probably have pretty thin margins too!
I don’t regret leaving academia. There was a lot of politics that could be tough to navigate, and it’s been lovely to just focus on science. I was hired at Fulcrum as a Bioinformatics Scientist, not an Engineer, so clearly that analysis background was something Nils and Tim were looking for. But over the past year, I’ve also had the chance to develop my skills in pipelining and tooling, which has been a lot of fun. I didn’t realize how much I missed diving into a real programming challenge. My undergrad in Canada was in straight computer science and statistics, and I even worked as a software developer for a bit before heading back for a Master’s and then a Ph.D. I worked on file format conversion—which, in hindsight, might be the perfect start for a career in bioinformatics!
Over the last year I’ve been happy to get to keep the variety of projects I used to see working at a core facility but now it’s like a super-professional core facility for the world. So I get to work on loads of different cool things, I have excellent support for the technical things that I’m learning, and it’s just a lot of fun.
What’s a common challenge in our industry that people don’t talk about enough?
Ironically, communication! Making sure you speak the right language for your client. That you really understand what they’re trying to do. Occasionally figuring out what they actually need instead of what they say they need. You have to be very careful to not talk at cross-purposes with each other. Sometimes that means asking very basic questions, not being offended when people ask the same back, and sometimes just slowing down at the start of a project to make sure that everyone is on the same page, understands the end goals, what might not be able to be answered. Setting expectations is a big part of communicating a project. I have certainly seen when this goes wrong. In academia it can be devastating for a career. In industry for a whole company. So we want to get it right.
What’s one tool, tip, or mindset shift that has made a big impact in your work?
It’s two sides to the same coin. One is setting aside your ego and saying “I don’t know”. Being honest about that and asking for help with things that you don’t know about. And the other side of that is battling your own imposter syndrome, to understand what you are good at, to project that confidence when it’s justified, when you do know your stuff.
What’s a recent project or insight you’re particularly proud of?
I have one client who wanted to compare something they were doing with something that is available in the public domain. The public domain tool was a mess in terms of getting it to run. It takes in big data and takes a lot of processing time. Getting it to run and making sure it was running correctly was really hard work, but I finally got it to run end-to-end with the correct input data, correctly formatted. When I finally did the comparison and the client’s assay performed better, that was nice and the client was very happy!
If you could give biotech startups one piece of advice, what would it be?
Understand your assay, your product, and do lots of diagrams. It will help everyone. It’s the best thing when you come to a client and they have really beautiful diagrams. Particularly when it’s sequencing and you can see “these are the pieces we’re sequencing and this is how they are coming together as we are constructing this particular fragment of whatever it is we’re going to sequence”.
What’s something outside of work that inspires how you think about problem-solving?
I am a big fan of just letting my brain work while I’m not actively thinking about things. People call them shower thoughts. Or you wake up in the morning and think “oh, that’s how that works”. Both letting your unconscious brain do the work, and giving your brain the space to do that work - making sure you get enough sleep and go for walks and give yourself breaks, go for a drive, have some music on, let your brain wander. It’s amazing what it will come up with.