# Nathan Clack

> Sr Staff Software Engineer at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Location: San Jose, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/nathanclack

Experienced Principal Engineer with a demonstrated history of working in the computer software industry. Skilled in OpenGL, CUDA, Python, Matlab, Computer Vision, Microscopy, and Science. Strong engineering professional with a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) focused in Biophysics from UC Berkeley.

## Work Experience
### Staff Software Engineer @ Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
Jan 2021 – Present | Leesburg, Virginia, United States

### Principal Software Engineer @ Kinetica
Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | Arlington, VA
Principal Engineer. Distributed visualization backend as part of a GPU-accelerated streaming data warehouse with SQL and REST interfaces, geospatial (GIS) and graph capabilities.  C++, thrust, CUDA, OpenGL, EGL, Cairo.

### Principal Engineer @ Vidrio Technologies
Jan 2014 – Jan 2019 | Ashburn, Virginia, United States
co-Founder (one of three). Sold to MBF Biosciences in 2020. Participated in business development, strategy, budget, approval, and hiring. Grew the business to 8 employees (3 senior engineers, 2 junior, 1 data scientist). 

Principal Engineer. Technical direction and R&D lead on consulting and grant-driven projects. Principal investigator (PI) on 5 grants including one Phase II SBIR and 3 BRAIN initiative grants. Hardware engineering team developed two new products: a specialized laser scanner for microscopes and a de novo PCIe card for microscope control. Software development included computer vision and machine learning projects with an emphasis on performance. Software products were developed with Python, Matlab, C/C++, CUDA, and Rust, and targeted multiple platforms including Windows, OS X, and Linux.

Product Manager for ScanImage, a software application for video-rate 3D laser scanning microscopy supporting holographic targeting, live motion correction and analysis. Performed project management, determined software architecture, roadmap and schedule. Managed collection of user input and proposed features. Markets are in the United States, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. As of 2018, 640 primary scientific publications across 320 institutes referenced ScanImage as a primary research tool.

### Bioinformatics Specialist @ Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Jan 2008 – Jan 2014 | Janelia Farm Research Campus, Ashburn, VA 20147
Research position working with Eugene Myers on behavioral video analysis, neuron tracing, and large scale neuroanatomy.  Developed instrumentation and informatics pipeline for large data sets (30 TB).

This work founded the MouseLight project at Janelia which employs a team of technicians and researchers that have to date reconstructed 1,000 projection neurons to reveal new cell types and characterize the organization of long-range connectivity in the mouse brain.

### Graduate Student Researcher @ UC Berkeley
Jan 2001 – Jan 2007 | Berkeley, California
Advisor Jay T. Groves.


## Education
### Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Biophysics
University of California, Berkeley

### Bachelor of Science (BS) in Mathematics
The University of Texas at Austin

### Bachelor of Science (BS) in Biochemistry
The University of Texas at Austin


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nathan-clack
- GitHub: https://github.com/nclack/
- Portfolio: http://whiskertracking.janelia.org/
- Portfolio: http://www.janelia.org/

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Source: https://flows.cv/nathanclack
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/nathanclack/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-12