Joseph Paulson is a statistical scientist at Genentech. He studied mathematics and completed a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, Statistics and Scientific Computation as a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2015. Under the guidance of Mihai Pop and Hector Corrada-Bravo he began developing computational methods for the analysis of high-throughput sequencing data and in particular metagenomics. Afterwards, he moved to the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health under Professor John Quackenbush where he began thinking of large network based solutions to understanding host-pathogen interactions computationally. The core of his interests involves accounting for sequencing artifacts, like under-sampling, to get at robust biological and translational interpretations. He is committed to open-source software and has contributed to Bioconductor and popular metagenomic pipelines.