Dr. Vega Shah was was like a gold miner during her undergraduate and graduate school studies, except instead of panning for gold, she was searching the metagenomes of ocean samples for new life and new metabolic functions. What she found was a new species of ocean bacteria, but she also realized that the software tools she relied on and the databases she used to answer her research questions were anything but solid. After grad school, she shifted her career to building software for biologists at Dotmatics, integrating tools such as Prism into electronic lab notebooks. Today she’s a program manager at Benchling working to integrate new functions and communicate these resources to scientists everywhere. It's a thoughtful conversation you won't want to miss. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts: https://rss.com/podcasts/ladyscientistpodcast/ Links for Vega Shah: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vegashah/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/dr_alphalyrae The Aliquot (her Substack): https://thealiquot.substack.com/ This episode is sponsored by LabDAO. Check out PLEX, an open source platform for running many of the latest and greatest new computational biology tools including DiffDock, RfDiffusion, and ColabFold. https://labdao.xyz/