Joan Clara Smith

Joan Smith is a senior staff engineer at Google. She is currently serving as a technical advisor to the CFO, where she oversees hardware resource allocation across all Google platforms. Previously, she was the lead for Google's Cloud Databases organization, including Bigtable, Spanner, Cloud SQL, and several internal and external database systems.

Joan is also a bioinformatics consultant at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory; she has led research projects on cancer biomarkers, drug targeting, and SARS-CoV-2 risk factors.

She is on the Technical and Product Advisory Board of RTP Seed, an investment fund focused on early stage technology startups.

Previously, she worked at Twitter on mobile platform development for Fabric (aquired by Google in 2017). While at Twitter, she created an open-source project to improve local development and test environments. Before Twitter, Joan worked on a Solaris kernel scalability team at Oracle/Sun Microsystems.

Joan graduated with a B.Sc. in physics from MIT, where she did research on quantum computing and software engineering.

• Resumé
• Genome-wide identification and analysis of prognostic features in human cancers
• Chromosomal instability accelerates the evolution of resistance to anti-cancer therapies
  • Web resource and data availability: survival.cshl.edu
• Cigarette smoke exposure and inflammatory signaling increase the expression of the SARS-CoV-2 receptor ACE2 in the respiratory tract

  Press Coverage:

  • Wired
  • The Week Magazine
  • Genetic Engineering News
• SRE Tools as Products, for IEEE
• Systematic identification of mutations and copy number alterations associated with cancer patient prognosis
• Full list of Publications
• Elite male faculty in the life sciences employ fewer women

  Press Coverage:

  • Slate
  • Boston Globe
  • Science Careers
• Galley talk at Flight

Github: joan-smith
Twitter: joans
LinkedIn: Joan Clara Smith