By Kate Rich
The eScience Staff Spotlight is a series featuring individual members of our team and their career journey. This week’s featured staff member is Cordero Core, a Senior Research Software Engineer at our Scientific Software Engineering Center (SSEC).
In and outside of the office, Cordero brings creative insights to technical problems. At SSEC, he specializes in developing and scaling databases for researchers in academic fields ranging from Neuroscience to Astrophysics. At home, you can catch him making the legendary desserts that got him invited to compete on Food Network’s Cupcake Wars. As a longtime software engineer with an impressive array of hobbies, he finds it important to balance his technical and inventive sensibilities. This mindset allows him to address problems more effectively and think across different domains for solutions. As Cordero explains, “it allows me to be really flexible, which is something software engineers and developers need.”
Early in his education, he realized the importance of this flexible mindset and just how much he enjoyed working across various disciplines. At the University of Alabama, Birmingham he received a Bachelors in Chemistry and initially thought he would become a medical doctor. Cordero shares that “it took some time to understand where my love for science meets my best technical aptitude.” It was not until he pursued his Masters in Computational Biophysics at UAB that he realized how much he enjoyed programming. He brought these interests together when he got a job conducting data analysis for the University of Alabama system where he helped scientific researchers translate their work in a beaker into computer models for analysis.
It was during this time that he was a coder by day and a baker by night. Always one to take on a side quest, he ran his own catering company that was featured in a bridal magazine for his southern desserts with a modern twist. Now, he mostly bakes for fun and some of his favorite sweets to make are banana pudding cupcakes as well as Fijian honey cake infused with Tennessee whiskey. For Cordero, cooking for others is sharing more than his favorite flavors. As he puts it, “I want someone to have a look into how I see the world, even if it’s just one moment.”
His career started to take him outside of his home state of Alabama when he was offered a PhD position in Computational Chemical Engineering at Vanderbilt. Cordero was ready to start his doctorate when, just a month before school started, a startup in Seattle reached out to him. He had never been to Washington state before so he was in awe when he visited for the first time in June. He decided to embrace the unexpected opportunity and move up here without knowing anyone from the Seattle area so he could pursue this new position where he helped develop a robotic microscope to assist pathologists doing biopsies.
After a few years, he transitioned to working in rocket science with The Aerospace Corporation. In this role, he helped launch rockets and analyze data. Next up, he tapped back into his entrepreneurial spirit and moved back to his home state to start Alabama’s first alcohol delivery service. His company was doing well until state legislation changed the rules around delivering alcohol and made it impossible for him to continue his business. Through some consulting work, he got the opportunity to come back to Seattle and jumped at the chance to return to the Pacific Northwest. Then, when the position opened up at SSEC, he explains “it was kind of a watershed moment” because back when he was doing data analytics in higher education he noticed “a problem: you have software that’s written by researchers that does what you need it to do, but it’s really clunky. Or you have software that’s written by software engineers that is really pretty, but not practical in what you actually need to get done.” SSEC was the answer to that problem. When he saw the opening he couldn’t help but think “oh, this is me. This is everything I’ve been looking for like 13-14 years. This is the solution.”
After an exciting path that challenged him as an innovator and an engineer, Cordero found a great home for his interests at SSEC. When asked what he would say to others who face big decisions early in their careers, he offered “know where you want to go, but sometimes the decisions that you make are about building up a skillset to get there.” He advises that the best opportunities happen “not necessarily all in one shot to make your dreams come true.” When it comes to his own journey, he offers that “ I saw so many years ago, when it comes to this interaction between researchers and software engineers and how this should work, and I didn’t really have an idea of how to make that happen. All of the smaller decisions that I made along the way were to make me better at software, but also kept me very adjacent to research too.”
Thank you to Cordero for bringing your positivity, kindness, and very tasty baked goods to the office. eScience would not be the same without you!