I'm a bioinformatician

Talk given at first North East Bioinformatics Forum meeting, 2016-05-31.

Transcript

1. I’m a bioinformatician Simon Cockell Bioinformatics Support Unit Newcastle University simon.cockell@ncl.ac.uk @sjcockell
2. sjcockell.me/2015/05/01/im-a-bioinformatician/
3. Being a bioinformatician means… being a biologist, programmer, sysadmin, statistician and grief counsellor, rolled into one
4. An old chestnut http://izquotes.com/
5. Being a bioinformatician means… writing yet another hacky data munging script that will break on the 32,356th line of the poorly defined, exception riddled, lumpen slurry of an input file you’re having to deal with this time
6. https://twitter.com/i_am_kilpatrick/status/732996403492880385
7. https://xkcd.com/927/
8. Being a bioinformatician means… teaching experienced scientists something new, and getting to see the dawning realisation that it might just be useful
10. Bioinformatics Training bsu.ncl.ac.uk/support/courses http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/news/people-skills-training/2016/160126-n-first-stars-awards-target-vulnerable-skills-life-sciences/
11. Being a bioinformatician means… crafting an exquisite pipeline that has to be subtly changed with each run because every dataset is a special little flower that needs bespoke treatment
12. https://xkcd.com/1319/
13. https://xkcd.com/1205/
14. Being a bioinformatician means… learning that Excel is an acceptable interoperability format, whether you like it or not (I don’t)
17. Being a bioinformatician means… playing a key role in an unparalleled range of exciting, cutting edge research
18. bsu.ncl.ac.uk/support/publications • Mechanistic disease studies • Systems biology • Data integration • Disease stratification • Health informatics • Drug repositioning • Diagnostics • Biomarker discovery • Epigenetics • Transcriptomics • Proteomics • And many more
19. Being a bioinformatician means… being part of an open, collaborative worldwide community who are genuinely supportive and helpful
21. A final thought ”Nice guys finish last” - isn’t that a terrible message to be sending to the next generation? I think what goes around comes around. You have to really want all the teams to succeed, all the boats to float. You want your competitors to not fail. - George Church, 2016. http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/05/if-youre-not-failing-youre-probably-not-trying-as-hard-as-you-could-be/