Dr. Heather Wells is the Director of Bioinformatics at Biotia, where she leads a team in the strategy and design of clinical-grade bioinformatic pipelines used to diagnose infectious diseases. After completing a dual undergraduate degree in biology and mathematics at Vanderbilt University and a Master of Public Health in infectious disease epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health, she completed her PhD in evolutionary biology studying coronavirus evolution at Columbia University.

Heather's prior research has focused on the macro-evolution of viruses in wildlife, particularly for coronaviruses. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, she worked extensively on the USAID PREDICT project performing comparative genomics for coronaviruses and paramyxoviruses. Her published work from this time includes the description and analysis of several novel wildlife viruses and their evolutionary relationships. After COVID-19, she published a study analyzing the recombination patterns of coronaviruses in wildlife closely related to COVID-19, underscoring the importance of recombination as a driver of the emergence of novel viruses. She then authored research studying patterns of coronavirus recombination in an experimental setting using novel bioinformatic tools for the detection of experimental recombination and is a leading expert in coronavirus recombination.

At Biotia, Heather has used her extensive domain knowledge in microbial evolution and strong background in applied mathematics to lead her team in creating sophisticated and highly accurate bioinformatic software. Using machine learning, they are able to separate the signal from the noise in metagenomic data, allowing them to tackle difficult diagnostic problems and describe diverse microbial communities with extremely high accuracy to unleash the power of metagenomics in clinical diagnostics.