Meredith VandeHaar

She/Her

I am bisexual and transgender and I am a pathology quality assurance specialist and a second year bioinformatics PhD student.//

I work at the Mayo Clinic handling quality assurance and regulatory readiness for the cytopathology lab. I’m also a part-time PhD student at the University of Minnesota in their Bioinformatics and Computational Biology program. I never imagined myself working in quality. As a bench cytotechnologist, statistics and regulations seemed so boring, but I needed a change as i was bored — i felt there was little room for me to continue to grow in my role. I applied for a position in laboratory medicine quality assurance and as the work started, I ended up loving it. My day to day is pulling and analyzing data on the lab’s performance, trending, and comparing to industry-wide benchmarks. My current job also allows me to serve in a leadership role in our LGBTI Employee Resource Group. I’m particularly proud of our hard work on a new Gender Transition Toolkit. I have a passion for automation — eliminating the most tedious parts of our jobs which machines may be much better at. My interests include machine learning/deep learning, image processing, natural language processing, and improving queer health outcomes.

Twitter @merelyqueerly