Gervaise Henry

Summary

Building data & AI platforms for genomics and multi-omics research. VP Solutions Engineering at Manifold — bench and computational biologist turned platform leader.

I’ve spent my career at the intersection of biology, data, and infrastructure: starting at the bench running high-throughput screens and single-cell RNA-seq, then moving into computational biology, cloud architecture, and ultimately leading the engineering organizations that build platforms for genomics and multi-omics research at scale. I’ve built and managed global teams of solutions architects, bioinformatics engineers, and services engineers across the US, Europe, and Asia. AWS Certified Solutions Architect & Cloud Practitioner. Certified Scrum Product Owner.

Experience

VP Solutions Engineering

Lead Solutions Engineering at Manifold, the AI platform for life sciences. Responsible for the technical customer-facing function spanning pre-sales and post-sales, partnering with sales, product, and engineering to win, deliver, and expand strategic customer relationships.

• Building and scaling the Solutions Engineering organization, with direct reports spanning solutions leadership and forward deployed engineering, and expanding the team with additional Forward Deployed Builders to meet growing customer demand.
• Provide technical leadership for Forward Deployed Engineers across the broader organization, guiding how they engage with customers on complex implementations even where reporting lines sit elsewhere.
• Partner with the pre-sales Solutions team across the technical customer journey — contributing to discovery, scoping, proof-of-concept development, and platform demonstrations — while owning post-sales implementation, technical delivery, and ongoing customer partnership.
• Maintain broad coverage across Manifold’s customer base with concentrated focus on strategic accounts — particularly high-risk, high-reward engagements where customer problems are technically complex and platform fit requires deep scientific and architectural collaboration.
• Build proof-of-concept, reference implementation, and demo assets across three purposes: supporting pre-sales in customer acquisition, driving expansion within existing accounts, and extending platform functionality for broader customer applicability.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to translate field signal into roadmap priorities and to stress-test new capabilities against customer needs before they ship.
• Serve as a liaison between customers, sales, product, engineering, and support, ensuring customer technical and scientific needs are represented throughout the organization.

VP, Head of Data Engineering

Led data infrastructure and management strategy for Champions’ research and development efforts, with responsibility for the data platform supporting multi-omics and research data workflows in alignment with FAIR principles.

• Set direction on modernizing Champions’ analytic pipelines, initiating rebuilds to bring them in line with current standards for reproducibility, maintainability, and scalability.
• Migrated the analytic compute environment onto a foundation that delivered meaningful reductions in pipeline runtime and cost, improving the economics of recurring analyses.
• Initiated the build-out of data provenance, lineage, and observability infrastructure — evaluating tooling and beginning implementation of the governance layer needed to support regulated multi-omics and research data at scale.
• Owned data organization and deployment for new data commercialization efforts, structuring datasets for external availability and partnering with business stakeholders to bring data products to market.
• Supported sales efforts as the senior scientific and technical voice, providing subject-matter expertise in customer conversations and shaping the technical positioning of data offerings.
• Contributed to new assay development efforts, particularly on the analytical and data-handling side — advising on how downstream analysis requirements should shape assay design, data capture, and output structure.
• Served as the senior technical voice for data strategy, partnering with R&D and executive leadership on platform direction, tooling selection, and long-term data architecture decisions.

Head of Professional Services Engineering

Led the Professional Services Engineering organization — a global team of 15–20 architects, bioinformatics engineers, services engineers, and contractors across the US, Europe, and Asia — responsible for all technical services delivery on the DNAnexus platform.

• Expanded scope from leading the Solutions Engineering function to leading all technical staff across Professional Services, following consistent delivery improvements under prior management.
• Oversaw services delivery across a global, distributed team — including customer-facing engineering, platform integrations, custom solution development, and data engineering for customer data ingestion.
• Managed a sizeable offshore contractor contingent alongside full-time staff, balancing delivery throughput with margin discipline as the services function reached its highest profitability during this period amid continued scaling.
• Partnered with Product Engineering and Product Management on roadmap priorities informed by customer delivery experience, and built proof-of-concept assets to support architectural decisions on new platform capabilities.
• Served as a technical liaison between sales, customers, and internal product and support teams — deployed frequently to strategic or at-risk customer engagements to resolve escalations and restore delivery trajectory.

Manager, Solutions Science Engineering

Managed the Solutions Engineering organization through a period of leadership transition, expanding scope mid-tenure to include a subset of the Professional Services engineering team.

• Led a team of 5–6 Solutions Engineers distributed across the US and EMEA, supporting presales engagements globally across all customer verticals.
• Took on additional management responsibility for part of the Professional Services engineering function following a leadership vacuum, tightening integration between presales and services — notably in SOW scoping accuracy and services utilization — which led to subsequent promotion to Head of PS Engineering.
• Built DNAnexus’s external technical presence in Europe and North America, delivering invited oral presentations at EU Biobank Week 2024, ACMG 2024, BioTechX Europe 2023, and the Precision Medicine Leaders Summit 2023, with additional panel participation at BioIT World 2023 on precision medicine and FAIR multimodal data.
• Built and refined proof-of-concept and demo assets to demonstrate platform capabilities against customer-specific scientific and technical needs.
• Partnered with Product Engineering and Product Management on roadmap prioritization based on field signal, and served as liaison between sales, customers, product, professional services, and support.

Senior Solutions Engineer

Individual contributor presales engineer supporting customers globally across all verticals, with particular depth in top-5 pharma and diagnostics.

• Partnered with sales on customer discovery, scoping, and technical qualification — translating customer scientific and operational needs into platform-fit assessments and architectural proposals.
• Built proof-of-concept assets to validate the DNAnexus platform against real customer workflows, including substantial WDL and Nextflow pipeline development and lift-and-shift work.
• Delivered platform demonstrations, technical training, and white-glove technical support for strategic accounts throughout the presales cycle.
• Served as technical liaison between sales, customers, and internal product, professional services, and support teams — recognized for technical depth and customer trust that led to first-line management responsibility following departures of other team leaders.

Computational Biologist

Research Associate

Research Associate

RA/TA

Used cellular and molecular biology techniques to investigate the effect of adipocytes and obesity on the multiple myeloma bone marrow tumor microenvironment. Techniques included cell culture (including co-culture), immunoblotting, ELISA, qPCR, tubulogenesis assays, invasion assays, viability assays, immunofluorescence, and confocal microscopy. Independently taught undergraduate lab courses, including design of laboratory content, assessments, grading, and student counseling.

Courses taught: Bio 200 Structure and Function of the Human Body, Bio 210 General Biology II, Bio 300 Cell Biology, Bio 356 Genetics.

Lab Technician

Screening Scientist

Summer Undergraduate Research Intern

Skills

Education

• American University
  Masters of Science: Biology
  Graduated 2014
  Thesis: Adipocytes, obesity and multiple myeloma
• Eckerd College
  Bachelors of Science: Biomedical Molecular Biology
  Graduated 2009
  Thesis: The Search for Novel NF-kB Inhibitors from Compounds Derived from Marine Invertebrates as Potential Anti-tumor Therapies

Honors & Awards

• Bioinformatics Fellow
• American University College of Arts and Sciences Graduate Conference Travel Grant
• American University College of Arts and Sciences Graduate Student Research Support
• American University College of Arts and Sciences Graduate Student Summer Research Support
• American University Biology Department Summer Graduate Award

Publications

• Frontiers in immunology (2025): Immune cell single-cell RNA sequencing analyses link an age-associated T cell subset to symptomatic benign prostatic hyperplasia https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2025.1585446
• Cell Reports (2022): Adipocyte mesenchymal transition contributes to mammary tumor progression https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2022.111362
• Bioinformatics (2022): SeqWho: reliable, rapid determination of sequence file identity using k-mer frequencies in Random Forest classifiers https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btac050
• The Journal of Pathology (2021): 5-alpha reductase inhibitors induce a prostate luminal to club cell transition in human benign prostatic hyperplasia https://doi.org/10.1002/path.5857
• The Journal of Pathology (2021): Single cell analysis of mouse and human prostate reveals novel fibroblasts with specialized distribution and microenvironment interactions https://doi.org/10.1002/path.5751
• Physiological Reports (2021): A NEW Approach for Characterizing Mouse Urinary Pathophysiologies https://doi.org/10.14814/phy2.14964
• Cell Stem Cell (2021): Pathologic HIF1α signaling drives adipose progenitor dysfunction in obesity https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stem.2020.12.008
• The Prostate (2020): Urethral luminal epithelia are castration-insensitive cells of the proximal prostate https://doi.org/10.1002/pros.24020
• Cell Reports (2019): Expansion of Luminal Progenitor Cells in the Aging Mouse and Human Prostate https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2019.07.007
• Cell Reports (2018): A cellular anatomy of the normal human prostate https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2018.11.086
• Cancer Cell (2018): Molecular evolution of early-onset prostate cancer identifies molecular risk markers and clinical trajectories https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccell.2018.10.016
• eLife (2018): Identification of functionally distinct fibro-inflammatory and adipogenic stromal subpopulations in visceral adipose tissue of adult mice https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.39636.001
• Cytometry Part A (2017): OMIP-040: Optimized gating of human prostate cellular subpopulations https://doi.org/10.1002/cyto.a.23187
• The Prostate (2017): Molecular pathogenesis of human prostate basal cell hyperplasia https://doi.org/10.1002/pros.23394
• Molecular Cell (2016): Non-cell-autonomous regulation of prostate epithelial homeostasis by androgen receptor https://doi.org/10.1016/j.molcel.2016.07.025
• Differentiation (2016): Isolation and analysis of discrete human prostate cellular populations https://doi.org/10.1016/j.diff.2015.10.013
• JoVE (2014): Endothelial cell tube formation assay for the in vitro study of angiogenesis http://dx.doi.org/10.3791/51312

Presentations

• NextGen Omics, Spatial & Data US (2026): From Spatial Transcriptomics to Multimodal Discovery: Scaling AI Driven Genomics on Manifold (ORAL PRESENTATION)
• EU Biobank Week (2024): Efficiently Analyzing Population-Scale Genomics Data (ORAL PRESENTATION)
• ACMG (2024): Automated Genome Interpretation Solution to Accelerate Diagnostic Decisions via Intelliseq GeneSpect™ Reporter (ORAL PRESENTATION)
• BioTechX Europe (2023): Bridging the Gap: Solutions for Data Integration, Security, and Collaborative Exploration in Precision Medicine (ORAL PRESENTATION)
• Precision Medicine Leaders Summit: Advances in Single Cell & Spatial Biology (2023): Democratizing Access to Single-Cell RNA Sequencing with the Parse Biosciences Evercode Platform (ORAL PRESENTATION)
• Precision Medicine Leaders Summit: Advances in Single Cell & Spatial Biology (2023): Innovation Panel: Building the Spatial Biology Ecosystem (PANELIST)
• BioIT World (2023): Towards Precision Medicine: Datasets, Computation, and Data Integration for Patient Subsetting Research - Part I (PANELIST)
• BioIT World (2023): Achieving FAIRness with Multimodal Data (PANELIST)
• Collaborating for the Advancement of Interdisciplinary Research in Benign Urology: Meeting (2021): Spatial transcriptomics reveals a transition from a prostate luminal to club-like cell state in 5-alpha reductase inhibitor treated BPH patients (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• Society for Basic Urologic Research: Annual Meeting (2021): Spatial transcriptomics reveals a transition from a prostate luminal to club-like cell state in 5-alpha reductase inhibitor treated BPH patients (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• Society for Basic Urologic Research: Annual Meeting (2021): Immune cell Single cell RNA sequencing and interaction analyses suggest a prominent role for T cells and T cell-macrophage interactions in Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• American Urological Association: Annual Meeting (2021): Understanding Prune Belly Syndrome at Single Cell Resolution (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• American Urological Association: Annual Meeting (2021): Characterization of 5ARI treatment response at the single cell level (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• Collaborating for the Advancement of Interdisciplinary Research in Benign Urology: Meeting (2020): Decoding Stromal Heterogeneity Across BPH Phenotypes (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• Collaborating for the Advancement of Interdisciplinary Research in Benign Urology: Meeting (2020): A Phenome-Based Approach for Characterizing Mouse Urinary Pathophysiologies (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• Society for Basic Urologic Research: Annual Meeting (2020): Decoding Stromal Heterogeneity across BPH Phenotypes (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• Collaborating for the Advancement of Interdisciplinary Research in Benign Urology: Meeting (2019): Immune Cell Interactions in Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• Collaborating for the Advancement of Interdisciplinary Research in Benign Urology: Meeting (2019): Identification of Cognate Proximal Cell Types of the Mouse and Human Prostate and Their Enrichment in Human Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• Cold Spring Harbor: Single Cell Analysis (2019): A Cellular Atlas of Human Prostate Disease (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• Society for Basic Urologic Research: Annual Meeting (2019): Identification of cognate proximal cell types of the mouse and human prostate and their enrichment in human Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• Society for Basic Urologic Research: Annual Meeting (2019): Immune Cell Interactions in Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• Society for Basic Urologic Research: Annual Meeting (2019): Expansion of Luminal Progenitor Cells in the Aging Mouse and Human Prostate (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• Prostate Cancer Foundation: Annual Scientific Retreat (2019): Urethral Hillock Epithelia Extend into the Proximal Prostate Stem Cell Niche (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• International Society for Advancement of Cytometry: CYTO (2019): Cloud-based cytometry workflow for big data analysis (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• American Urological Association: Annual Meeting (2019): Cellular pathogenesis of human BPH (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• Collaborating for the Advancement of Interdisciplinary Research in Benign Urology: Meeting (2018): Building a comprehensive cellular anatomy of the normal and diseased human prostateia (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• Society for Basic Urologic Research: Annual Meeting (2018): Global Transcriptional Dynamics Identify Key Functional Pathways Involved in the Pathogenesis of Prune Belly Syndrome (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• Society for Basic Urologic Research: Annual Meeting (2018): Characterizing the metabolic effect of enzalutamide on prostate cancer (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• Society for Basic Urologic Research: Annual Meeting (2018): A Cellular Anatomy of the Normal Human Prostate and BPH (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• 10x Genomics User Group Meeting: Houston (2018): Determining Cellular Heterogeneity in Human Prostate using the Chromium™ Single Cell 3’ Solution (ORAL PRESENTATION)
• FlowTex Conference (2018): Determining cellular heterogeneity in human prostate with flow cytometry and single-cell RNA-sequencing (ORAL PRESENTATION)
• North Texas Flow Cytometry Conference (2017): Determining cellular heterogeneity in human prostate with flow cytometry and single-cell RNA-sequencing (ORAL PRESENTATION)
• Society for Basic Urologic Research: Annual Meeting (2017): Pathogenesis of Inflammation in Human BPH (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• North Texas Flow Cytometry Conference (2016): Deconstructing BPH Phenotypes: Molecular Pathogenesis of Basal Hyperplasia (ORAL PRESENTATION)
• Society for Basic Urologic Research: Annual Meeting (2016): Deconstructing BPH phenotypes (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• Society for Basic Urologic Research: Annual Meeting (2015): Cell-specific responses to inflammation in BPH (POSTER PRESENTATION)
• American Association of Cancer Research: Annual Meeting (2014): Adipocytes, Obesity and the Multiple Myeloma Microenvironment (POSTER PRESENTATION)

Open Source Contributions

• Open Source Visualizations
  • 2021: cellxgene: Single cell analysis of mouse and human prostate reveals novel fibroblasts with specialized distribution and microenvironment interactions
    https://cellxgene.cziscience.com/collections/4b54248f-2165-477c-a027-dd55082e8818
  • 2020: cellxgene: Urethral luminal epithelia are castration-insensitive cells of the proximal prostate
    https://cellxgene.cziscience.com/collections/fbc5881f-1ee3-4ffe-8095-35e15e1a08fc
  • 2018: cellxgene: A Cellular Anatomy of the Normal Adult Human Prostate and Prostatic Urethra
    https://cellxgene.cziscience.com/collections/e2a4a67f-6a18-431a-ab9c-6e77dd31cc80
• Open Source Data
  • 2021: GEO: Single cell RNA-sequencing of verumontanum region and peripheral zone of normal human prostate
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE179312
  • 2021: GEO: Human prostate luminal epithelia adopt a club-like state in response to low androgen levels
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE178934
  • 2021: GUDMAP: Single cell analysis of mouse and human prostate reveals novel fibroblasts with specialized distribution and microenvironment interactions
    https://doi.org/10.25548/17-DRBC
  • 2021: GEO: Single-cell RNA-sequencing of adult mouse lower urinary tracts v2
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE173096
  • 2021: GEO: Single-cell RNA-sequencing of adult human normal and BPH (glandular and stroma) prostates and urethra
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE172357
  • 2021: GEO: Bulk RNA-sequencing of fibroblasts isolated by FACS from normal human prostate
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE172347
  • 2020: GUDMAP: Urethral luminal epithelia are castration-insensitive cells of the proximal prostate
    https://doi.org/10.25548/16-WM8C
  • 2020: GEO: Single-cell RNA-sequencing of adult mouse lower urinary tracts
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE145929
  • 2020: GEO: Single-cell RNA-sequencing of adult human prostates and urethra (normal and diseased)
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE145928
  • 2018: GEO: Single Cell RNA-sequencing of cell types isolated by FACS from normal human prostates
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE117403
  • 2018: GEO: Bulk RNA-sequencing of cell types isolated by FACS from normal human prostates
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE117271
  • 2018: FLOWRepository: OMIP-040: Optimized gating of human prostate cellular subpopulations
    https://flowrepository.org/id/FR-FCM-ZY6D
  • 2018: GUDMAP: Determining cellular heterogeneity in the human prostate with single-cell RNA sequencing
    https://doi.org/10.25548/w-r8cm
• Open Source Code
  • 2021: RNA-seq Analytic Pipeline for GUDMAP/RBK
    https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4429315
  • 2020: Strand Lab analysis of single-cell RNA sequencing
    https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3687064
  • 2019: Single-Cell RNA-Seq Image Generation Pipeline for GUDMAP/RBK
    https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2652611
  • 2019: BICF Cellranger mkfastq Analysis Workflow
    https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2652611
  • 2019: BICF Cellranger count Analysis Workflow
    https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2652611
  • 2018: Determining cellular heterogeneity in the human prostate with single-cell RNA sequencing
    https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2652611
• Projects
  • 2021: GUDMAP/RBK Analytics
    Design and manage the Agile group responsible for creating analytics for data stored on the NIH consortiums GUDMAP and RBK. This analytics are not only best-practices pipelines written in Nextflow, but also integrates seamlessly with the consortiums' data-hub, in terms of initiation, and data ingress/egress. It is built with the flexibility to utilize on premises HPC, or a custom built AWS architecture (including many serverless resources) for low-cost, highly-available queueing, compute, and reporting. It can also be easily adapted to almost any running environment using custom configs. The entire pipeline utilizes dockerized micro-services which is orchestrated by Nextflow.
  • 2020: Nextflow in the Cloud
    Manage a small agile team to create a proof of concept AWS architecture to run Nextflow pipelines in the cloud. It utilizes low-cost, highly-availability queueing, compute, and storage resources. (NOTE: project decomissioned and the git repository is no longer public, for more information feel free to reach out to [Gervaise Henry](ghenry@gmail.com))
  • 2019: Pipeline Run Tracking
    Creating a pipeline run tracking tool for the Bioinformatics Core Facility at UT Southwestern Medical Center. This tool utilizes AWS serverless offerings, including REST-API and a website for run tracking. (NOTE: project decomissioned and the git repository is no longer public, for more information feel free to reach out to [Gervaise Henry](ghenry@gmail.com))
  • 2019: Strand Lab Internal Data Website
    Developed the internal Strand Lab website and manage the server used explore and share pre-publication single-cell RNA-sequencing data. (NOTE: project is private, for more information feel free to reach out to [Gervaise Henry](ghenry@gmail.com))
  • 2019: Strand Lab External Website
    The Strand Lab website was designed to not only provide a location to share information about the lab, but also provide a means to showcase the lab's data and biorepository. The single-cell data is displayed using CZI's cellxgene visualization tool as well as pre-generated genome-wide visualization of the expression data. The lab has an extensive biorepository of human lower urinary tract biosamples and de-identified clinical data as well as H&E images are available for viewing and filtering on the website. The site is hosted serverlessly on AWS.
  • 2018: BICF Pipelining
    Creating analytics for the Bioinformatics Core Facility at UT Southwestern Medical Center, using the pipelining language Nextflow.