Meet the Team: Amy Olex
At the Wright Center, we seek to advance science and foster partnerships that accelerate translational research for the betterment of human health. Our team members come to work every day ready to transform laboratory discoveries into treatments for patients, engage communities in clinical research and train a new generation of clinical and translational scholars, all with the shared goal of bridging the gap between scientific theory and practical medicine.
Each month, we will highlight one member of our team who is contributing to our shared mission of advancing science and fostering partnerships that accelerate translational research for the betterment of human health.
For a full list of staff members, please visit cctr.vcu.edu/aboutus/staff.
Amy Olex joined the Wright Center informatics team in 2014. As a senior bioinformatics specialist, she provides bioinformatics and natural language processing (NLP) research services to the VCU and VCU Health communities through education and training, pipeline development and data analysis. Olex specializes in processing next-generation genomic sequencing data and is currently developing a pipeline to process the first single cell RNA-Seq data generated by a VCU Health researcher. She also leads bioinformatics and NLP seminars and workshops, and is the lead in a new Wright Center collaboration with Chicago’s CTSA to use NLP methods to improve surveillance of the opioid epidemic. Olex earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science at VCU in 2005, followed by a master’s degree in computer science and a certification in structural and computational biology at Wake Forest University in 2007. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in computer science with a focus on NLP at VCU. Outside of work and school, she enjoys spending time with her two children and husband, as well as gardening, crafts and outdoor activities.