Ryan Pontius
Ryan Pontius

Bioinformatics • Data Engineer • Health Data Science

Hi, I'm Ryan!

I wrangle tens of thousands of genomes (WGS)—cleaning, validating, and running them through massive variant calling pipelines to help build one of the largest conservation genomics datasets ever assembled. Concurrently, I engineer data pipelines that turn tens of millions of continuous glucose records into standardized, machine learning-ready datasets for health and medical research.

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Education

MS in Health Data Science — Dartmouth College (Geisel School of Medicine)

June 2025 – Present

Graduate education in health data science with coursework and applied experience spanning machine learning, biostatistics, epidemiology, biomedical data science, and bioinformatics.

BS in Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology — UC Santa Cruz

September 2019 – June 2023

Built my scientific foundation in molecular biology while developing an interest in computational research, genomics, and data-driven scientific work.

Work Experience

Glucose-ML — Augmented Health Lab

October 2025 – Present

Glucose-ML is an evolving database of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) datasets designed to support data-centric research in diabetes by providing standardized CGM data that can be explored interactively prior to download. The broader goal of the project is to make CGM research more accessible and streamline the process of finding high-quality datasets fit for ML/AI research.

What my work as the Glucose-ML data engineer looks like:

  • I designed and developed CGM and metadata processing pipelines to build the Glucose-ML repository from the ground up
  • I lead the development of statistical and analytical tools that power the interactive Glucose-ML web interface
  • I collaborate closely with the web development team to provide feedback on design and brainstorm new features
  • I am first author on the peer-reviewed manuscript introducing Glucose-ML as a large-scale, evolving CGM dataset collection
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California Conservation Genomics Project

June 2023 - Present

The California Conservation Genomics Project (CCGP) is a large-scale collaborative effort to produce one of the most comprehensive regional WGS biobanks of genomic resources supporting biodiversity research, species management, and conservation across California.

What my work as the CCGP's Bioinformatics Data Wrangler looks like:

  • I manage and organize multiple large-scale databases that store 20,000+ samples and 230+ terabytes of whole genome sequencing (WGS) data.
  • I oversee the quality control and submission of sequencing data and sample metadata to NCBI's SRA, BioSample, and BioProject.
  • I am responsible for calling variants across 150+ species projects and ensuring results meet project standards.
  • I develop Python, Bash, and R-based scripts, along with Snakemake pipelines, that interact with our databases, perform quality control tasks, and efficiently run computationally intensive bioinformatics pipelines for population genomics research.
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Publications

[1] Ryan Pontius, Worayada Pitakanonda, Zimo Li, Kultum Lhabaik, Fengran Wang, Baiying Lu, Yanjun Cui, and Temiloluwa Prioleau. 2026. Glucose-ML: An evolving collection of continuous glucose datasets to accelerate data-centric AI for diabetes. Submitted to ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2026). *Under review

[2] Baiying Lu, Zhaohui Liang, Ryan Pontius, Shengpu Tang, Temiloluwa Prioleau. GlucoFM-Bench: Benchmarking Time-Series Foundation Models for Blood Glucose Forecasting. 2026. Submitted to ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2026). *Under review

[3] Enbody, E.D., A. Nakamoto, C. Mirchandani, M. Baylis, A. Chambers, C. Miller, R. Pontius, E. Toffelmier, CCGP Consortium, B. Shaffer, R. Corbett-Detig. Regional conservation genomics highlights factors affecting population health. *In preparation.

My Digital Portfolio

Check out examples of my coding projects and research over the years. Visuals and links to the projects are provided too!

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My Email

Please reach out if you want to discuss research science or potential opportunities! Always happy to chat.

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