Zekarias Asaminew '26 at John Deere's headquarters, where he works as a student software engineer building enterprise-scale applications used across multiple manufacturing facilities.
How Asaminew ’26 built a bioinformatics major
By the time most students settle into a major, Zekarias Asaminew was doing something much more difficult: he was building one.
Now a senior at Augustana and part-time employee at John Deere, Asaminew is completing a bioinformatics and computer science double major tailored to his interests in health care, biology and coding, a path he developed through Augustana’s contract major, with support from faculty across multiple departments.
The result looks clear in hindsight, but the path to it was anything but straight.
When Asaminew came to Augustana from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, he planned to study biochemistry and follow a pre-med track. Medicine was the goal, and biochemistry felt like the right foundation.
Asaminew and Dr. Forrest Stonedahl, with whom he conducts computational neuroscience research, is developing machine learning pipelines to analyze EEG brainwave data.
“But after I took my first computer science class, I realized how powerful coding is,” Asaminew said. “It makes life easier and more efficient, and the growth of AI is a clear example of that.”
Instead of choosing one interest over the other, he pursued both. He was drawn to the way coding could automate tasks and increase efficiency, but he remained deeply interested in biochemistry and the field of medicine. Even when told the two paths would be difficult to complete together in four years, he did not want to let either go.
That ambition led him to Augustana’s contract major option. He began researching the process and speaking with his advisor about whether bioinformatics was possible.
“That was the moment I realized bioinformatics was possible,” he said. “Combining these two majors could create a path into that field.”
Creating a new major required collaboration across departments, with faculty in computer science, biology, chemistry, math and data-related fields. But it was not as simple as combining relevant courses. He had to develop a formal proposal that aligned with his academic goals and the classes he had already taken.
Dr. Pamela Trotter, professor of chemistry and biochemistry and Asaminew’s advisor, said contract majors require students to take the lead in building their own academic path.
“The student has to be the one who does the work,” Dr. Trotter said. “Zekarias was willing to do the research necessary to make sure the program he put together would actually be useful in the future.”
For Asaminew, the planning process meant working closely with multiple facilities and faculty members across departments.
“Designing the major meant talking with professors from multiple departments to get their insight on which courses would be most important,” he said. “The planning phase was definitely the most challenging part of the whole process.”
Asaminew at IBM TechXchange Student Developer Day in Orlando, Fla., where he engaged with engineers and researchers working on AI, cloud computing and enterprise data systems.
From start to finish, the process lasted about a semester and a half. During J-term of his junior year, he drafted a written proposal explaining what the major would include, why he wanted to pursue it, and how it connected to his future goals. Faculty helped him revise the proposal before Augustana’s Educational Policy Committee (EPC) reviewed it.
For Asaminew, the moment the major felt real was not tied to paperwork.
“I realized it when I saw how much support I received from professors and others involved in the process,” he reflected. “Once people across departments were willing to support me, I knew it was possible.”
He also credits his primary advisor, Dr. Pamela Trotter, with helping coordinate communication across departments and the EPC.
Asaminew today describes bioinformatics as a field that combines biology, chemistry, math and data to solve health care problems through code and technology.
He believes bioinformatics is becoming increasingly important as artificial intelligence reshapes research. He expects health care research to include more data-driven, computational modeling and AI-assisted problem-solving.
Asaminew points to predicting shapes of proteins in the body, which can lead to new drug design and disease treatment, as an example of how AI is accelerating work that once took years.
“Research is no longer only about working in a lab and pipetting,” he said. “In health care fields especially, it’s moving toward AI-driven discovery, like systems such as AlphaFold that predicted millions of 3D protein structures almost overnight.”
Asaminew’s path to bioinformatics was not obvious when he arrived at Augustana. Yet by refusing to set aside any of his interests, he successfully created a contract major that combined them, reflecting both his curiosity and ambition.
By Summer Pandey ’27