Dan Kolbman

I'm an engineer at Zipline International.
I build data and software products for autonomous delivery drones.

My career has been focused on developing software in close collaboration with scientists.

It all began during my undergraduate program in Physics at the Rochester Institute of Technology where I created computational models to study the interaction of cancer cells. It was clear that the field of research physics had much to gain from ideas of modern software devlopment.

When I arrived on the scene at the Center for Data Intensive Science at the University of Chicago, however, I found that bioinformaticians already had adopted many modern software practices. Nevertheless, I was able to help improve how cancer genomics data is shared through my contributions to the NCI's Genomic Data Commons as a developer.

Having learned a thing or two working with bioinformaticians, I took my knowledge to the Center for Data Driven Discovery in Biomedicine at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. There, I was one of the first engineers to work on the NIH's Kids First Data Center: data sharing in the pediatric cancers and rare-disesase realm. I made defining architectural decisions, established development practices, and lead a team in developing an internal tool to collect and track data.

I then make a pivot to a the private space to work at Culture Biosciences, a mid-stage biotech startup. There, I worked closely with many skillsets from wetlab technicians to hardware engineers to design and develop products that ultimately progress a variety of fields in biotechnology.

Now I am working at Zipline to bring autonomous drone deliveries to market. I played a crucial role in forming our Data Platform team and continue to work closely with a multitude of technical leaders to mature our data and software practice.