Please Explain this Gap in your Resume

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a stretch on my resume between leaving a computational biology role at Flagship Pioneering in Cambridge and showing up as a Senior Data Engineer at Lantern Pharma in Dallas that doesn’t look anything like career progression.

I was on a farm in North Carolina.

I’d spent two years at Etiome as the first software engineer, building ML infrastructure for single-cell RNA-sequencing and electronic medical records. We were modeling the biochemical factors of disease progression temporally, at single-cell resolution, trying to capture how disease actually evolves across patients where everybody is n=1. Great team, good data, interesting problems. But the higher the resolution got, the more it felt like I was getting a sharper and sharper image of the wrong thing. We could see what happened as disease progressed. We couldn’t see what caused it to progress. If the biochemical pathways were transistors, we were watching them flip without ever finding the programming language behind their orchestration. Those are two very different questions, and no amount of sequencer resolution was going to collapse them into one.

Research on Reed Bender

Please Explain this Gap in your Resume