Shea Gardner

Shea Nicole Gardner of Oakland died Feb. 21 after a 15-month battle with metastatic lung cancer. She was 46.

Gardner was born in Fontana, California and grew up in Bellingham, Washington, graduating in 1987 from Sehome High School as her class' valedictorian. She also was selected as the female recipient for the state of Washington’s U.S. Presidential Scholars Program.

Gardner graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1991, with a degree in evolutionary biology. During the fall of her junior year, she studied lemurs with Alison Jolly at the Berenty Reserve in Madegascar. Her summers during college were spent conducting research on monkey brains in St. Kitts (sophomore), studying mahogany trees in Bolivia (junior) and at Princeton as a teaching assistant for summer biology classes (senior).

After earning a Ph.D. in population biology from the University of California, Davis, in 1997, Gardner accepted a postdoctoral fellowship for Imperial College London, where she worked for two years. She was set to become an assistant professor at the University of Washington in the fall of 1999, but changed her mind after she was awarded an E.O. Lawrence Fellowship to work at LLNL that same year.          

Gardner joined the Laboratory in September 1999 as a postdoctoral fellow and, three years later, was hired as a bioinformaticist, eventually working for the Lab team that has worked on numerous applications for the Lawrence Livermore Microbial Detection Array.

“Shea Gardner was a population biologist who transformed herself into one of the best bioinformatics scientists in the world of molecular diagnostic design. She was incredibly productive and left behind major open source software contributions that are being used world-wide and will be for many years to come,” said Tom Slezak, the associate program leader for Bioinformatics and a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff.

“At our team’s funding peak in 2009-10, Shea was making major contributions monthly to as many as eight different funded projects. We remember Shea for the brilliance in her eyes and face as she would speak passionately about ideas that only now are some of us realizing were years ahead of the rest of us. She raised the bar for all of us who worked with her, in terms of science, professionalism and the ethics of the complicated domain we work in,” Slezak said.

“Shea had a passion for being able to influence not only biodefense, but also human health at large. This dream will be realized as the microarrays she designed and the software she released continue to be applied by many others. Shea is truly one of the giants upon whose shoulders the next generation of bioinformatics will stand as improvements continue to be made in microbial detection and characterization.”

Two polymerase chain reaction assays that Gardner developed in 2003 have been approved and recently brought online for usage by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration as the new gold standard for hepatitis-A virus detection tests for food safety.

Gardner’s hobbies revolved around the outdoors, including hiking in the Sierra Nevada mountains, snowshoeing, cross country skiing with her Siberian-Tamaskan hybrid dog Pooshka, as well as swimming and snorkeling. She also enjoyed sailing trips in and around Vancouver and the San Juan Islands with her family.

During her 15 years at the Laboratory, Gardner regularly attended aerobics classes. She visited more than 50 countries and particularly enjoyed exploring ancient ruins and castles.

Gardner is survived by her husband, Erik Yip, of Oakland; her mother, Susan Gardner, of Bellingham, Washington; her sister, Krista Hammer, and brother-in-law, Eric, and nephews Davis and Carson, all of Bellevue, Washington. Her father, Bill Gardner, preceded her in death.

Contributions in her memory may be made to: the National Youth Science Foundation, Earth Justice, Nature Conservancy and Urban Releaf.