Spotlighting Our Engineering Team: The Experts Accelerating Our Data (Eric Lau)

We’re shining a spotlight on a few of our Engineering team members at Verana Health. This team of more than 40 bright minds is responsible for the development of sophisticated pipelines and platforms that allow us to ingest and curate a high volume of de-identified healthcare data that can help accelerate research and improve patients’ lives.

In this blog series, we spotlight Eric Lau.

Q: How would you explain your role?

A: As a senior software engineer, my role involves taking data that’s been ingested from electronic health records and feeding it into the variable curation pipeline. The pipeline then sends the curated variables to a database that our application uses to present information to users.

Q: What attracted you to the field of Engineering?

A: As a youth, I wanted to build giant robots, but was only able to build plastic models. This sparked my interest in the field of engineering.

As I grew older, I wanted to build skyscrapers and bridges, so I decided to major in Civil Engineering. After I graduated from college, I worked on satellites at Raytheon. I then did a stint at a startup during the dot-com days, and then went on to work as an aerospace engineer at NASA Ames Research Center.

Q: What attracted you to Verana Health?

A: I was attracted to Verana Health due to the desire to learn a new domain. I also wanted to expand my career in the healthcare technology field.

Q: What inspires you to do this work?

A: Helping find ways to improve patient outcomes is what inspires me to do this work. 

Q: What is the most rewarding part of your job?

The most rewarding part of my job is witnessing things that I’ve built being used to benefit others

A: The most rewarding part of my job is witnessing things that I’ve built being used to benefit others. One example is my work in helping automate our processes and pipelining to make it even easier to get ML models into production.

Q: What advancements do you see in your field in the next 5 years?

A: Instead of doing things ourselves, I foresee artificial intelligence co-pilots doing a lot of the heavy lifting, or some of the more remedial work. This will allow humans to focus on the more complex and creative tasks at hand.

In his free time, Eric enjoys visiting restaurants and trying new cuisines (Pictured at a restaurant near the Sacramento Delta).