Yo! š
I’m Robert Petit (puh-teet, not pet-it), a “classically trained” bioinformatician focused on AI-driven strategies, public health pathogens, and workflow/tool development, mostly on the bacterial side. (haha yes, someone called me “classically trained” because I was taught C and Perl back in the day) If I had to describe my “bioinformatics philosophy”, it would be “good-enough practical bioinformatics”; I’m in public health, so we need things that answer our questions today, because we have to move on to the next outbreak!
Like I mentioned, I’m classically trained, and have been a bioinformatician for 15+ years now. I’ve been primarily working as a bioinformatician with the Wyoming Public Health Laboratory (5+ years) in the great state of Wyoming. While the wind can be pretty annoying in Wyoming, I do enjoy living here and the group at WPHL makes it all the more worthwhile. At WPHL, my role includes building up the bioinformatic capacity, developing new tools to meet our needs, and facilitating bioinformatic training. With the support of WPHL, I have continued to develop Bactopia, an end-to-end bacterial genome analysis pipeline, for 5+ years now.
I also act as a part-time bioinformatics consultant for various academic, government, and private organizations. As part of this consulting, I’ve had the opportunity to explore open-weight models (DeepSeek, Qwen, and GLM) and local inference strategies (vLLM, llama.cpp, SGLang) on both NVIDIA and AMD hardware. Through local-first approaches, I’ve implemented efficient workflows and skills that leverage these LLMs on open-source harnesses. If you are interested in collaborating or need assistance with bioinformatics projects and LLM-readiness strategies, feel free to reach out!