Alexandra Rolfness

I am a junior at Caltech majoring in Computer Science. I have a unique perspective and skillset after a major switch from bioengineering. I came to the decision of switching after realizing that much of what I had loved in past research experiences was centered around the programming and engineering aspects of the work I was doing. The pace, scale, and freedom to create afforded by computer science have made me excited about a future in technology.

My experience at the New York Stem Cell Foundation as a production automation intern has given me industry experience coding in python on several projects. Originally hired as just a research intern, I quickly became interested in learning about the extensive automated lab systems at the company from the automation engineering and software team. As a self-starter I programmed a user-friendly GUI to streamline cold storage organization and automating sample cataloging to make one of my lab tasks more efficient and after demonstrating this to the team was given additional responsibilities in creating multiple automated methods in python with an OpenTrons liquid handling robot to automate stem cell production quality control and generating validation workflows for flexible high throughput gene-editing experiments. 

The coursework that I have completed up to this point and will finish by the end of this spring term at Caltech has provided me with a solid foundation in data structures and algorithms, software design, and machine learning.