Swee Hoe Ong

Principal Software Developer

Alumni

This person is a member of Sanger Institute Alumni.

"Initially trained as a bench scientist, I have spent over 20 years evolving into an interdisciplinary scientific leader bridging the gap between wet-lab biology, genomics, data science, and software engineering. My career has been defined by a commitment to translating complex biological questions into scalable computational solutions that accelerate drug discovery and clinical diagnostics.

During my 12+ years at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, I have progressed through several key initiatives:

• Multiplex Assays of Variant Effects (MAVE) Operations: I was on secondment with the MAVE Informatics team that develops and provides bioinformatic capability to support the MAVE initiative in a multi-disciplinary and Agile environment.
• Cancer Genomics (CASM): I developed and maintained swPipe, a high-depth variant-calling pipeline for targeted and exome DNA sequencing, while leading RNA-seq and CRISPR/Cas9 functional screen analyses to support over 10 wet-bench scientists.
• Stem Cell Genetics: I designed genome-wide CRISPR knockout pooled gRNA libraries, establishing novel efficacy metrics that enabled the interrogation of non-standard targets across diverse species and cell lines.
• Virus Genomics: I contributed to the engineering of large-scale de novo genome assembly pipelines that processed over 20,000 HIV-1 datasets for major international collaborations including BEEHIVE, ICONIC, and PANGEA.

Beyond bioinformatics, I am a Certified Scrum Master and Product Owner, experienced in applying Agile methodologies to scientific research to ensure reproducibility and efficiency. I am particularly passionate about the intersection of genomics and AI, currently prototyping local LLM integrations and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to streamline literature synthesis and genomic data analysis. I remain driven by research that translates directly into improved diagnostics and therapeutics.

My timeline

• Left the Wellcome Sanger Institute.

• Joined the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

• Joined the Genome Institute of Singapore as Postdoctoral Fellow.

• Graduated with a Ph.D. from the Department of Public Health and Epidemiology, Swiss Tropical Institute, University of Basel, Switzerland.

• Joined the Dengue Unit of the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases in Singapore as a Graduate Research Associate/Ph.D. candidate.

• Joined the Genome Institute of Singapore as Bioinformatics Specialist.

• Graduated with an M.Sc. in Bioinformatics from the Faculty of Medicine, National University of Singapore.

• Joined the A*STAR Bioinformatics Institute as Graduate Research Associate/M.Sc. candidate.

• Graduated with a B.Sc. in Cell and Molecular Biology from the Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Life Sciences, National University of Malaysia.