Ken Youens-Clark

My name is Ken Youens-Clark. I work as a Senior Scientific Programmer at the University of Arizona. Most of my career has been spent working in bioinformatics, using computer science ideas to study biological data.

I began my undergraduate degree as a Jazz Studies major on the drum set at the University of North Texas in 1990. I changed my major a few times and eventually ended up with a BA in English literature in 1995. I didn’t really have a plan for my career, but I did like computers.

Around 1995, I stared tinkering with databases and HTML at my first job out of college, building the company’s mailing list and first website. I was definitely hooked! After that, I managed to learned Visual Basic on Windows 3.1 and, during the next few years, I programmed in several languages and companies before landing in a bioinformatics group at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2001, led by Lincoln Stein, a prominent author of books and modules in Perl and an early advocate for open software, data, and science. In 2014 I moved to Tucson, AZ, to work at the University of Arizona, where I completed my MS in Biosystems Engineering in 2019.

When I’m not coding, I like playing music, riding bikes, cooking, reading, and being with my wife and children.