SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA
Craig is currently the Vice President of Advanced Engineering in the Research and Technology Development group at Illumina Inc., the leading provider of DNA sequencing and array technologies. There he leads teams innovating in optics, microfluidics, electronics, nanofabrication, and deep-learning. Prior to Illumina Craig was Vice President of Engineering at Kaiam, where he was responsible for the development and production of 100G transceivers. He was also the founding CEO of Tactus Technology, an innovator in the user interface industry, where he was the co-inventor of Tactus’ morphing screen technology. Before Tactus he had a variety of roles at Intel, JDSU (now Lumentum), Bookham (now Oclaro) and Ignis Optics, developing a wide range of products in the fiber-optics market. He started his career at Toshiba Research Europe, where he performed early terahertz images of skin cancer. Craig holds a BSc (hons.) in Applied Physics and Ph.D. in Physics, both from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.
Today, information is being digitized on a massive scale, by servers in datacenters, by mobile devices, and by networks of sensors everywhere around us. Artificial intelligence techniques and ubiquitous processing power are making it possible to mine this massive ocean of data; however, integral to harnessing this data as knowledge is the ability to store it for long periods of time.
DNA Sequencing using Sequencing-by-synthesis (SBS) technology is today responsible for the majority of sequencing done worldwide. This presentation will cover the fundamentals behind SBS, the steps involved in going from a DNA sample to data, and the current state of art of sequencing platforms. The presentation will end by discussing how DNA sequencing can be applied to DNA-based data storage.
