James Diggans is a Distinguished Scientist, Bioinformatics and Biosecurity, at Twist Bioscience, a DNA synthesis company based in San Francisco, CA. He holds a PhD from George Mason University in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and has worked in target discovery, molecular diagnostic development and biodefense including leading the computational biology group at the MITRE Corporation. His research has included methods for adaptive detection of biological weapons release, machine learning-based cancer diagnosis, and novel algorithmic approaches to discerning intent in oligonucleotide-length DNA synthesis requests.
At Twist, he builds cloud-based bioinformatics systems for manufacturing design, biosecurity screening and analysis of next generation sequencing data to power silicon-based DNA synthesis at record scale.