Anna “Anya” Parker is a scientific software engineer in the EVE group at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH) in Basel. She is a member of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and part of the Pathogen Data Network. In her role at the EVE group, she builds scalable tools for pathogen genomics, data storage, and data analysis. She is a co-developer of Loculus — a database and query engine for large-scale pathogen sequencing data — and a maintainer of Pathoplexus, an open-source database for viral pathogens. With a background in mathematics and computational biology, Anya is motivated by the application of quantitative methods to public health, and she is enthusiastic about building open-source tools that support public health labs, outbreak response teams, and researchers around the world.

Anya’s career spans applied mathematics, software engineering, and scientific computing. She began in theoretical cryptology at the University of Bern’s Cryptology and Data Security Group, later interned at SONOVA focusing on digital signal processing, and worked in Site Reliability Engineering at Google Zurich, gaining a broad and systems-oriented foundation for tackling complex technical problems. Before joining Swiss TPH, she worked as a scientific software developer in the cEVO group group at ETH Zurich, contributing to Loculus, Genspectrum, LAPIS and LAPIS-SILO, and spent a year in the Neher Lab at the Biozentrum Basel, contributing to TreeTime, Nextclade, and TreeKnit for phylogenetic and pathogen-surveillance analysis.

Across teams, Anya is known for her curiosity, creativity, and infectious enthusiasm. She thrives at the intersection of software engineering and scientific discovery, where clean architecture meets complex biological questions. Outside of work, she plays drums, bullet journals and experiments with protein modeling and structural AI — finding joy in learning, collaboration, and a good beat.