Draft:Rhonda E. Harrison



Rhonda Harrison is the first Black person and the first woman to earn a PhD in Bioinformatics. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, she created the first Drosophila genetics database and is a Bioinformatician & Consultant.

Education & Career
Dr. Harrison designed her own Bachelor Degree with Individual Concentration in computer graphics completed at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1990. She spent summers working at Digital Equipment Corporation, Eastman Kodak Corporation and Bell laboratories where she provided computer graphics programming to Yann LeCun, one of three Godfathers of AI, in his early work in machine learning. In 1998 Dr. Harrison earned an MS in Biomedical Engineering under Charles Cantor for her masters thesis in which she optimized genome mapping using a statistical approach. She returned to Boston University under Charles DeLisi, co-founder of The Human Genome Project, and Richard Young at MIT’s Biology Department in the area of multi-omic regulatory networks predictions. She conducted transcriptome processing for the ENCODE Pilot Project for Harvard Medical School as a postdoc in George Church’s lab.

At the Molecular Biology Computing Lab at Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute, she provided bioinformatics programming and sequence analysis support to molecular biologists. One such project was the first Drosophila database at the 1992 Drosophila Meeting where funding for FLYBASE was first announced. She utilized Michael Ashburner‘s acedb platform, the Drosophila’s community’s “Redbook” and data she collected from labs around the world. It was during this time that she met Temple Smith who recruited her to the Bioinformatics program at Boston University. She provided Millennium Pharmaceuticals genome mapping and clinical data computing support. Between degrees she joined Jill Messirov’s Lab to provide assistance to Todd Golub’s landmark work in precision biology using hidden Markov models.

Today, Dr. Harrison divides her professional time between biotech and medtech business consulting and diversity and inclusion engagement.