Resume

Isabella V. Garcia

i4garcia@ucsd.edu · San Diego, California · isatope.dev

University of California, San Diego 07/2022 – 06/2026

B.S., Bioengineering: Bioinformatics; Minor: General Biology GPA: 3.71

Languages

Python, R, bash, Java, C++

Bioinformatics

NGS sequence analysis, sequence alignment, genome assembly & annotation, biological database design & querying, public repositories (NCBI, Ensembl)

Data & ML

Machine learning (classification, feature selection), statistical & comparative analysis, data visualization; pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn

Systems

Unix/Linux, HPC & remote development, pipeline development, Git/GitHub

J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) 07/2025 – 06/2026

Senior Design Researcher, UC San Diego Bioengineering La Jolla, CA

Built machine learning software in Python on a two-person team under Dr. Max Qian to classify leukemia and predict patient outcomes from flow cytometry data
Applied feature selection and classification modeling across 16 parameters and 288 patient samples, evaluating model performance against clinical outcome labels
Synthesized an extensive literature review and reported findings to the group weekly in formal written reports
Authored the project's analysis of ethics, safety, design considerations, and engineering standards

Genentech — Outstanding Student Awardee Intern 06/2025 – 09/2025

Selected as an Outstanding Student Awardee for a 3-month internship in the Media & Process Group, Cell Culture and Bioprocess Operations
Led design and implementation of a Python tool performing novel metabolic analyses, mining 2 years of historical process data alongside literature-derived methods to improve bioprocess operations
Presented results to the group and at the Intern Project Showcase poster session

Cabrales Lab @ UC San Diego — Undergraduate Research Assistant 10/2023 – 06/2025

Research assistant in the Functional Cardiovascular Engineering Research Group under PI Pedro Cabrales
Led software development on hyperspectral characterization of hemoglobin-based oxygen carriers (HBOCs) using a microfluidic chip
Led rapid low-cost %HbS quantification assay project
Presented research poster at Spring 2024 Undergraduate Research Symposium

BENG 181 — Molecular Sequence Analysis: sequence alignment, dynamic programming, HMMs, phylogenetics
BENG 182 — Biological Databases: schema design, curating and integrating public genomic data
BENG 183 — Applied Genomic Technologies: sequencing platforms, read mapping, RNA-seq, functional genomics
CSE 151A — Machine Learning: supervised/unsupervised learning, model selection, regularization, evaluation
CSE 185 — Advanced Bioinformatics Lab: genome assembly, variant calling, analysis pipelines on Unix/HPC