In December 2020, Colorado Mesa University was determined to find a way to hold their graduation ceremony in person. With only two weeks to build and design a solution, we teamed up with the university and our collaborators at the Broad Institute to help make an in person commencement possible for graduates and their families at a time when many colleges and universities were still operating remotely.

When presented with an overwhelming amount of information, how can we understand what’s actually important? Since the onset of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, researchers who have been examining the genome of the virus across its many variants have been both helped and hindered by the unprecedented amount of data that has been collected on the disease. As part of our ongoing effort to create a suite of tools for working with SARS-CoV-2 sequencing data, we saw the challenge of the ever-shifting nature of the virus as an opportunity to help our collaborators hone in on the most relevant mutations when presented with a new lineage.