100 days left in Europe

I have already been here 33 days or one quarter of my trip.  It has passed faster than I thought.  I am concerned that I have a lot of work to do and only 100 days left to do it. 

The research has been progressing at a reasonable pace and I know it will all come together in the end.  I have planned three trips to visit other universities while I am over here: Munich Germany, Leuven Belgium, and Strasbourg France.

Trip to Munich in March

I met a group of researchers from Munich Germany when I was in Barcelona last April for a Computational Biology Conference.  I hit it off with one of them.  He is an older student with a wife and three children.  We both spent a number of years working in industry before returning to school to chase the PhD.  

Gergely is originally from Hungary but has been in Germany for the past few years.  He's just about to finish his PhD.  He has arranged for me to visit, found me a room and an interview with his professor who has a post-doc position available for a bioinformatican. 

There are some interesting possibilities that could be imagined with this group.  Their group consists mainly of computer scientists that are processing biological data.  This is a group that I feel much more at home with than the biologists.  When I am with the biological groups, I am usually the only computational person and I must interact within a subject I am much less familiar.

Even though I have spent a bit of time in Europe and studied German for years in high school, I have never been there.  I did stay one night in Germany when I was eighteen, but it was a tourist town on the Rhine and everyone spoke English.  We will see how much of my German I can remember after 35 years. 

Trip to Leuven outside of Brussels, Belgium at beginning of April

I have been introduced to a colleague of my thesis advisor.  She indicated that I am in Europe and would like to visit interesting labs.  Kevin Verstrepen was at MIT and Harvard when my advisor was at MIT.  He was happy to have me come visit and even hooked me up with another grad student that has a bed available.  I found some cheap flights and should be able to keep the costs down for a four day trip.

I have never been to Belgium and have no idea what the country is like.  I do know that Brussels is the center of the European Union and NATO.  Therefore it is a very international city and I have been told that most of the people can converse in English, so I don't need to learn Flemish.

The Verstrepen Lab is a molecular biology lab that is similar to the lab I am a member of in Boulder.  They endeavor to understand how the transcription process works by experimenting with yeast cells.  We usually use either the strain of yeast used in baking or the strain used in making beer.  These cells are easy to grow and we are able to measure the processes that are going on in within the cells.  Yeast cells are very adaptive and their genome can change within a very few generations.  We can control the changes to the DNA and then measure the changes that occur within the cell. 

Of course we cannot "see" any of this.  The data from an experiment is hundreds of thousands, millions, or billions of individual pieces of information.  This is where I, as a computational biologist, come into the picture.  We take all this information and arrange and organize it into a set of usable information.  We can tell if the changes from one experiment are statistically different from another, we can visualize the information and allow the biologist to "play" with the data, viewing it from different perspectives.  We can use this information to build models of how the cell is performing the processes and we can see what outcomes might occur from changes we are planning in the future. 

Planning a trip to Strasbourg France in mid April

I met a very well known professor from Strasbourg last year in Boulder.  He is also a friend of my thesis advisor and I will be visiting his lab in mid-April.  Strasbourg is a smaller city, about the size of Boulder, and has a large number of students at the different universities in the area.  It will be nice to visit somewhere besides big cities.