Andrew Manigault, PhD

Software Engineer, Researcher

I apply a scientifically-rooted approach to engineer creative, user-centric software solutions.

About

I build software the way researchers solve problems — rigorously, iteratively, and with a relentless focus on what the evidence actually shows. My path into engineering started in health psychology, where I spent a decade designing experiments, analyzing data in R, and writing for peer review. That foundation didn't just introduce me to code; it shaped how I think about building software.

The skills that make a great engineer — debugging a broken system, gathering user feedback, adapting to new tools — map directly onto scientific practice. Hypothesis testing is just structured debugging. User acceptance testing is just an experiment. Keeping up with a shifting tech landscape is no different from tracking an evolving field of research. I didn't learn these habits in a CS classroom, but I've been using them professionally for years.

Today I develop applications and tools for InductiveHealth and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where I regularly work across new tech stacks in service of a valuable public health mission: stopping disease through technology. I love that this work demands both technical depth and real-world impact.

Outside of work, I'm usually running, spending time with my wife, cat, and dog, or exploring game design and development.

If you're looking for a software engineer who brings genuine scientific thinking to the craft — reach out. I'd love to connect.

Experience

  1. 2023 — Present

    Software EngineerInductiveHealth Informatics

    Developed containerized tools for monitoring data quality within the National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), improving data access, usage, and report sharing. Introduced several new applications and enhanced legacy web applications, refactoring backend and improving ease of data exploration.

    • Python
    • SQL
    • R
    • Docker
    • JavaScript
    • html
    • css
    • Linux
    • Bash
    • Palantir Foundry
  2. 2021 — 2023

    BiostatisticianBrown University – Center for the Study of Children at Risk

    Developed R packages/scripts to support research center activities including infant cry acoustic analysis, latent growth curve modeling, multilevel modeling, data cleaning and visualization. Trained machine learning classifiers to identify neonatal opiate withdrawal syndrome using infant cry acoustics.

    • R
    • SAS
    • MATLAB
    • SQL
  3. 2020 — 2021

    Post-doctoral Research FellowUniversity of California Los Angeles

    Developed R package to perform multithreaded transcriptomic origin analysis. Carried out Psychoneuroimmunology research activities, including statistical analysis and manuscript writting.

    • R
    • SAS
    • Java

Projects

Most of my professional work requires some level of CDC access and is not linked to my personal github. However, I tried to list some shareable projects on this website.

  • Web Portfolio (this website)

    A modern, responsive portfolio website built with Next.js, React, and TypeScript. This project was my introduction to this popular tech stack. I enjoyed the way React promotes modular design with components and found that very little was lacking for the purpose of a static web application.

    • Typescript
    • React
    • Next.js
    • Tailwind CSS

  • Neural Network from Scratch

    A Kaggle notebook showing how to code a neural network from scratch in R. I followed along a cool Python tutorial on writing a digit recognizer neural network. This project helped me gain clarity on how neural networks leverage back propagation to improve their predictions.

    • R
    • Python
    • Kaggle

  • ShinySnake

    An Interactive Web application made with R Shiny. The application illustrates how a very simple set of heurisitcs may be applied to automate the game "snake". This project introduced me to speeding up a given R function with a C++ substitution, adding Javascript and CSS to an R Shiny Application, and training a neural network to play the game using previous game states as inputs.

    • R
    • Shiny
    • shinyapp.io
    • C++
    • CSS
    • Javascript

  • Transcript Origin Analysis

    An R package to carry out a genomic analysis technique that compares gene expression between a sample and a reference expression profile. This project was a software port of some older Java code graciously shared by Dr. Steve Cole. I initially intended to re-write the procedure in R to better understand how it works. Here I learned how to compile and run Java code, how to do multithreading in R, and how to break down a larger program into data "checkpoints" to check the accuracy of my port.

    • R
    • Java

  • Hexpow Mobile Game

    A "connect-3" mobile game made with Unity. The intent of this project was to familiarize myself with C#, Unity, and the process of releasing apps on the Google Play Store. This project was the start of a new hobby (i.e., game development) and gave me a taste for strictly typed, object-oriented languages like C#.

    • C#
    • Unity
    • Google Play Store

Publication