Featuring Dr. Ruth Cheng
Show Notes:
Listen in to hear Dr. Ruth Cheng dive into the pivotal career moments that shaped her leadership style and strategic mindset. She recounts leading a therapeutic delivery project at Boston Scientific that she ultimately chose to terminate—an experience that taught her the value of recognizing failure early and reallocating resources wisely. At Smith & Nephew, she embraced a high-stakes strategic planning role without prior experience, relying on mentorship and collaboration. Dr. Cheng also discusses ATCC’s evolution from 2D to advanced 3D cultures and the growing need for standards that support complex biological research, especially in the era of personalized medicine and engineered biology.
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.
