Mat Strand is a software engineer specializing in bioinformatics, currently working at 23andMe, a personal genomics company in Silicon Valley. With majors in math and computer science, he graduated from Chapman University with top honors. His bioinformatics background includes a National Science Foundation grant where he developed ortholog.us, a bioinformatics search application identifying genes in arbitrary species related through speciation, and training at the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Having lived in Hong Kong for half a year, he is still learning Cantonese – but he is fluent in Python, Java, C++, C, SQL, LaTeX, Ruby, among others.