Dr. Benedict Paten is an associate professor in the Department of Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is also an associate director of the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute. He received his Ph.D. in computational biology from the University of Cambridge and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. Dr. Paten’s work is broadly focused on the growing field of computational genomics. He is involved in several large-scale efforts, he is currently a PI of the Human Cell Atlas Data Coordination Platform, the NHGRI AnVIL, HuBMAP, GENCODE, and the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium. Through these efforts and many smaller collaborations, he is helping to develop methods to further our ability to assay and understand genomes.