Senior Manager, Medical Bioinformatician
Labcorp Oncology
Dr. Wallen is a computational scientist and practiced bioinformatician with 7+ years research experience in statistical genetics/genomics, metagenomics, clinical data analysis, and gene-environment interaction. He has experience with developing bioinformatic and statistical pipelines for processing and analyzing a variety of data types including NGS data from genomic and metagenomic experiments, genetic variant data detected through NGS or genome-wide arrays, environmental exposure data, and clinical subject data.
As a Medical Bioinformatician within Labcorp's Enterprise Oncology group, Dr. Wallen works closely with oncologists, pathologists and scientists within and outside of Labcorp to lead bioinformatic pipeline development and data analysis efforts, turning data generated by Labcorp's suite of precision oncology diagnostic assays into evidence and figure sets to accelerate publication efforts. He transitioned to Labcorp from his postdoctoral position in the Center for Neurodegeneration and Experimental Therapeutics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) where he also completed his PhD in Genetics, Genomics, and Bioinformatics. His PhD and postdoctoral research focused on characterizing gut microbiome alterations in Parkinson's disease and investigating how alterations in the gut microbiome interact with host genetic, environmental, clinical, and disease related factors.