Megan Blanchard, M.S.
Principal Systems Architect Life Sciences & Diagnostics
I help product development teams design
lab workflows that don't fail in the field.
With 15 years across diagnostics, genomics, and life science platforms, I specialize in turning scientific innovation into workflows that actually hold up. Scalable, compliant, and built for the real operational pressures of high-throughput labs.
I work at the intersection of product development, laboratory workflow, automation, and software. My role is to get the right people aligned on the right architectural decisions early, before misalignment becomes rework, risk, or a product that technically works but nobody wants to use.
I’m vendor-independent and system-first. I don’t start with an instrument, a LIMS, or a preselected solution. I start with the end-to-end workflow, then define how assay, hardware, automation, software, data, and operator interactions need to work together as one system.
My focus is not any one component. It is the architecture between them.
I've partnered with research, clinical, and high-throughput labs across a range of regulatory environments. That gives me a fluency in how customers actually work: their constraints, their workarounds, the gaps no one's documented yet.
Inside development teams, I act as the voice of the customer, pressure-testing design decisions against real-world fit so products launch with strong adoption and a lighter support burden.
I take on a small number of engagements at a time, focused on the moments where early architectural clarity makes the biggest difference to product success, usability, and long-term supportability.
- What does a lab systems architect do?
- A lab systems architect defines how assay, instruments, automation, software, data, and operators work together as one end-to-end workflow. The work is deciding interfaces, handoffs, data flow, and failure handling early, so the system scales and holds up under real lab conditions rather than only on paper.
- Is Blanchard Strategic Systems tied to any instrument, LIMS, or automation vendor?
- No. Megan is vendor-independent. Engagements start from the end-to-end workflow and the program's requirements, not from a preselected instrument, LIMS, or platform. Vendor and technology choices are evaluated against how the whole system needs to perform.
- What kinds of teams do you work with?
- Product development, R&D, and operations teams building or scaling genomics, NGS, diagnostics, multi-omics, and clinical laboratory workflows, including CAP/CLIA environments, high-throughput labs, and sample-to-answer platforms across research, clinical, and commercial settings.