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The Tacos and Tech Podcast highlights the builders of companies, technologies, and the ecosystem of San Diego with a local flair for our lifestyle as well.

Meet Ashley Van Zeeland, who came to San Diego in 2008 as a postdoc scientist at Scripps Translational Science Institute and within 10 years never left a 2.5 radius mile of La Jolla/Torrey Pines. From finishing her postdoc, getting her MBA at UCSD Rady School, being the first female-led and genomics company in startup incubator EvoNexus, and acquired by cloud-first genomics unicorn Human Longevity, she has had quite the San Diego journey. She’s now advising multiple startups as she works on her next endeavor.

Ashley co-founded Cypher Genomics in 2010 with Eric Topol, Ali Torkamani, and Nik Schork while in the lab at Scripps which developed software to dramatically reduce the time required to interpret raw data produced by genome sequencing.

Cypher Genomics was acquired by Human Longevity in 2015 and she became the CTO of the company in 2016.

Ashley speaks to the strong need for technical talent in genomics: “We have four chambers of a beating heart in genomics. We need Bioinformaticians, Software Engineers, User Experience (UX), Dev Ops skill sets.”

Favorite taco spot: Oscar’s & Galaxy Taco in Pacific Beach

Favorite beer: Modern Times Fortunate Islands

Favorite coffee spot: Brick & Bell or Birdrock Coffee

Follow @Ashley_VanZ on Twitter to see what she’s working on next!

Thanks to our sponsor Cox Business for their support of the San Diego tech community. Come out to their May 10th celebration of our tech leaders by visiting http://www.toptechexecs.com/