{"id":199,"date":"2009-01-18T09:40:01","date_gmt":"2009-01-18T09:40:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/2009\/01\/18\/what_do_you_do\/"},"modified":"2025-01-30T07:49:13","modified_gmt":"2025-01-30T07:49:13","slug":"what_do_you_do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/2009\/01\/18\/what_do_you_do\/","title":{"rendered":"What do you do?"},"content":{"rendered":"

How do you answer the simple question What do you do?<\/em><\/p>\n

When the (semi-)joke Me? Oh, I’m just an eternal student!<\/em><\/p>\n

is met with the inevitable Oh…studying what?<\/em><\/p>\n

but Bioinformatics…and Theoretical Systems Biology…<\/em><\/p>\n

returns a quizzical look:<\/p>\n

(_Bio – informatics?_)<\/p>\n

Where do I go from there?<\/p>\n

I typically resort do – It’s like computers, but for biologists. I’m a biologist, so this year I’ve got to learn computing.<\/em><\/p>\n

If my new acquaintance’s eyes have not yet glazed over, and they want to know what you can do<\/em> with bio-, bio-, bio-what-was-it-you-said-again?<\/em>, my favourite example is<\/p>\n

You know those whizzy 3D pictures you see of proteins, or viruses, or molecules, sometimes on the news, or in the paper?<\/em><\/p>\n

(For an example, see the ‘cool bit’ on Stephen’s video<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Figuring out what those structures look like, from what we know about proteins, now that is a classic problem in bioinformatics.<\/em><\/p>\n

I’m not sure that this doesn’t leave some people with the impression that I’m some kind of graphic designer.<\/p>\n

But other summaries of what bioinformatics is, or what bioinformaticians do, don’t seem to get it right either.<\/p>\n

We deal with big biological data sets.<\/em><\/p>\n

We use computers to study biological problems.<\/em><\/p>\n

Perhaps it will be easier to explain (although perhaps harder) once I am working on a project, not preparing (or trying to prepare) assignments in Java or Python.<\/p>\n

Or perhaps I should adopt the strategy favoured by him indoors.<\/p>\n

I just say I’m a pilot.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How do you answer the simple question What do you do? When the (semi-)joke Me? Oh, I’m just an eternal student! is met with the inevitable Oh…studying what? but Bioinformatics…and Theoretical Systems Biology… returns a quizzical look: (_Bio – informatics?_) … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[189,192],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging-the-phd","category-nature-network"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3057,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions\/3057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}