Flashes of Panic

This morning, I went to a talk by a prospective Ph.D. student. It’s part of the qualifying for the degree, to present your current research and give some idea of how that’s going to progress to a dissertation. I have a strategy about talks; I go to as many as I reasonably can, I understand whatever I can (usually somewhat less than 50%,) and I keep my mind open.

The hope is that eventually, something will stick. There is a lot happening in CS. My strengths are not in math, and, by extension, not in theory. My contribution to this field is going to be finding a good way to apply the theory I attempt to learn—doing interesting stuff the smart way, I suppose.

Today’s talk was about nutrigenomics, which is sufficiently obscure, still, that my spell-checker doesn’t recognize it. The idea is pretty self-evident when you think about it: the nutrients you eat interact with sections of your genetic code. The chain isn’t hard to put together in theory, but the individual links of an individual chain are far from simple to visualize. Today’s talk was about ways to make that easier, or at least that’s the part I think I understood.

The part that was really interesting to me was that the presenter has two collaborators outside the CS department, in our medical school and our nutrition science school. (We have a nutrition science school? This is news to me.) Also, that he’s a part-time grad student with a full-time job in the office where my assistantship is, and next week we’re meeting with someone else from the medical school about hacking some perl scripts for mass spectrometry of proteins.

There seems to be a lot of interest in Computational Biology (“Comp Bio”) here, and while my own background in biology is sketchy, it’s intriguing. Maybe it’s everything I learned by osmosis at my last job—and my belief that we need a better phylogenetic analysis tool. I wonder how much biology you’d need to know to improve on the current state of the art—not just the user experience, which I already have a low opinion of, but the actual computation performance.

Now Playing: Gone Too Far from Tomorrow by James