Featuring Dr. Ruth Cheng
Show Notes
Tune in to hear ATCC CEO Dr. Ruth Cheng reflect on her personal and professional journey during the organization’s centennial year. From a childhood fascination with science to upper management roles in biotech startups, Ruth shares how her identity as a scientist continues to shape her leadership. She discusses the importance of innovation, adaptability, and diverse perspectives in STEM leadership, and reaffirms ATCC’s mission to support scientific discovery through reliable, reproducible biological materials. Ruth also explores how diversity in leadership helps combat confirmation bias and fosters a culture of curiosity and long-term thinking.
Guest
Ruth Cheng, PhD
President and CEO | Member, Board of Directors (ex-officio)
As CEO of ATCC, Dr. Cheng drives the company’s mission to advance scientific discovery and innovation. Dr. Cheng’s leadership at ATCC is driven by her commitment to enabling scientific discovery at a rapid pace through the application of digital and physical biological content. Prior to her appointment as CEO, Ruth was senior vice president and general manager, Research & Industrial Solutions, leading strategic partnerships, product development, sales and marketing, and external innovation efforts. She also led ATCC’s R&D and BioNexus scientific teams. Her leadership positioned the company into areas important to ATCC’s future including bioinformatics and biological reference data. Additionally, Ruth expanded the number and diversity of its scientific strategic partnerships and has contributed to the continuous transformation of our culture and strategy.
Host:
David Yarmosh, MS
Lead Bioinformatician, ATCC
David Yarmosh is a lead bioinformatician in ATCC’s Sequencing and Bioinformatics Center. He’s a graduate of New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. He has been working in large data aggregation and analysis since 2013 and microbial genomics with a focus on biosurveillance R&D efforts since 2016. David has led international training exercises in Peru and Senegal, sharing metagenomic analytical capabilities. His interests include genomics database construction, metadata collection, drug resistance mechanisms, bioinformatics standards, and machine learning. Since joining ATCC in 2020, David has worked extensively in SARS-CoV-2 classification, epidemiology, and genomics evaluation, including enhanced and uniform variant reporting. He has contributed more broadly to genomics reporting and analytical standardization and he has helped develop the podcast Behind the Biology, which he now hosts.
