Harriet Dashnow is a bioinformatician and PhD candidate at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, working on computational methods for clinical genomics. Her method for detecting STR expansions was recently published in Genome Biology. This work prompted her invitation to speak at Genomics of Rare Disease in the UK. Harriet obtained a BA, BSc and a MSc (Bioinformatics) with Dean’s Honours from the University of Melbourne, before working for the Melbourne Genomics Health Alliance. She was awarded a MCRI Top Up Scholarship and an Australian Genomics Health Alliance PhD Award. She has substantial experience in teaching bioinformatics and genetics. She co-authored the O’Reilly programming book Elegant SciPy.