Deanna Church, Ph.D.

Dr. Deanna Church has spent much of her career dedicated to ensuring the highest-quality reading of genomes, and ensuring that tools to utilize genomics resources were accessible to all. Now she is focused on empowering scientists to write genomes through a scalable, efficient approach. As Vice President, Mammalian Business Area and Software Strategy at Inscripta, Dr. Church aims to apply the company’s novel Digital Genome Engineering technology to mammalian systems and to ensure that our software platform provides a world class experience for our customers. Prior to this she served as Senior Director of Applications at 10x Genomics, where she led a dynamic team of scientists working on pioneering new methods in functional genomics, and as Senior Director of Genomics and Content at Personalis, where she helped advance the field of genomics-based clinical diagnostics. Dr. Church began her career as a staff scientist at NCBI, where she contributed significantly to the human and mouse reference genomes by establishing an international collaboration (The Genome Reference Consortium) to ensure these reference assemblies continued to improve once the Human Genome Project completed. Additionally, she spearheaded many projects at NCBI to develop tools for improved representation and visualization of human and model organism genomes. She earned her BA in liberal arts from the University of Virginia and her doctoral degree in the biological sciences at the University of California, Irvine, with Dr. John Wasmuth. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in developmental biology with Dr. Janet Rossant at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.