This paper has been years in the making, and though I was only involved towards the end it was still a lot of fun. The paper evaluates several different methods for performing multiple sequence alignments (MSA). MSAs are used in biology to determine how similar several genes or proteins are. This is useful, for instance, to determine how closely related genes are among different species. Alternatively, MSAs can be used to compare different genes or proteins within a single species to find similar functions. MSAs are useful in other scientific fields, such as linguistics, where you need to determine the similarity between a number of sequences of things (like sentences of words).
What a BLAST! We both had a really great time at the Symposium. The lectures were great (even if they were a little too kinase heavy) and it was really fun to hang out in a social setting with people I work near everyday. Hearing everyone talk about their work during the lectures was really great too.
On Saturday, Elizabeth and I took a hike in the wilderness and met a very cool retiree who belongs to the clan that owns all the land around Pitlochry. We chatted for the better part of a half hour as we walked back together and had a most enjoyable time. That night was the Ceilidh, a Scottish dance that resembles square dancing. Afterwards came the quiz session; a cross between a drunken game show and a game of Trivial Pursuit. We came in 5th but still had a great time!
All in all a really good weekend. The only thing it lacked was sleep *lol*
It’s been a fun month at work! Below is a picture of my new Cisco 6509. It’s been a blast to play with and poke around. It’s nice to have good hardware to use and network planning is always.
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Working in Academia was more satisfying in many ways than working in startups. Most of the people who work in research were smart, well informed, and enjoy their work (Elizabeth and I thought this was because the pay was half that of the private sector, so anyone who doesn’t like it gets a job there elsewhere).
I really enjoyed working in the Bioinformatics Dept. and had great coworkers. This was the first time in all my career when I could truly say that I enjoyed everyone I worked with.
Seminars were particularly enjoyable and it was always easy to find people talking passionately about things they love.
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academia bioinformatics career science uod Posted on: January 1st, 2003 under work.
I started working at the University of Dundee after I moved to the UK to be with Elizabeth. It was, in retrospect, fated to be. I was spending all my time in Elizabeth’s lab learning everything I could about molecular biology (thanks Elizabeth!) and invariably ended up bumping into the only other people on campus that had an interest in large scale computing. After a very short and informal interview I started in the Computational Biology Dept. with a larger role overseeing all the high-performance computing in the faculty. This doesn’t sound terribly interesting until you consider the research powerhouse that the Life Sciences Faculty contained — to me, it meant being involved in projects with a huge range of research and some incredibly interesting problems to solve.
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