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iSGTW - 3 June 2009

Feature - Amoolya Singh: Computation and biology

Feature - Amoolya Singh, computation and biology

Amoolya Singh in her office at EMBL. All images courtesy of SET-Routes

Editor's note: Readers may recall our series on women in grid computing last March. ISGTW interviewed more enterprising, trailblazing women in science and computing than our month-long series could accommodate! We will continue to bring you these and other personal profiles occasionally.
iSGTW: What do you do?
Amoolya Singh: I'm a computational biologist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, which is a fancy way of saying I use computers to understand living things.
iSGTW: How did you get interested in this field?
Singh: My interest in science has been mainly shaped by my family origins. I was born and raised in India, in a family of scientists and artists. I remember at the age of five going with my mother to her laboratory and asking what she did. She explained that she took very detailed pictures of the insides o

Dan Drollette

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Feature - Clarity in clinical care

Feature - Clarity in clinial care: achieving fully interoperable databases

Werner CeustersImage courtesy of W. Ceusters.

Werner Ceusters, director of the Ontology Research Group at the NYS Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics & Life Sciences, spoke at the Bio-IT World Conference in Boston this past April on the topic of "Do Healthcare IT Standards Hamper the Advance of Science?"

“Swimming is healthy and contains eight letters.” Absurd? Of course — the real thing is confused with its symbolic representation. Absurdity, then, abounds in current Electronic Health Records (EHRs) according to Werner Ceusters of the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences and the University at Buffalo. A polyp by any other name… A significant and universal problem with legacy EHRs, Ceusters says, is that software programs that access them cannot adequately differentiate between diagnoses for a given patient and link them prope

Anne Heavey

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Feature - Grid computing promotes diversity in biotech

Feature - Grid promotes diversity in biotechnology at Virginia State

Image courtesy of VSU, Biology department.

Biotechnology is one of the fastest-growing sectors in science, but it suffers from a lack of diversity in its workforce, as do many other scientific fields. Recent studies* suggest that African-Americans and Hispanics lag behind whites for higher-paying biotech jobs by the largest margins in about a decade.Researchers at Virginia State University, an institution designated by the U.S. Department of Education as one of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), are addressing this imbalance by using grid technology as a resource to teach students and educators about bioinformatics. Glenn Harris, an assistant professor in the Department of Biology at VSU, used grant funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Institutes of Health to obtain a 12-node cluster server and the iNquiry bioinformatics software suite developed by The BioTe

Anne Heavey

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Visual

Image of the week - Melanoma image analysis

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Spotlight

Link of the week - The Dagdigian Doctrine

Image courtesy of Bio-ITWorld.com

What's old news? What's exciting now? What's down the road? What's just hype?In the opening keynote of the 2009 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo last April in Boston, Chris Dagdigian told it as he saw it. A founding partner for the BioTeam IT consultancy, he delivered an educated assessment of the best, the worthwhile, and the most overhyped information technologies for the life sciences.Ken Davies covers Dagdigian's talk in Bio-ITWorld.com. You'll only find a few highlights from the article here . . .What does Dagdigian think is dead?“Unlimited data storage is over,” he noted, according to Davies. Dagdigian asserted that it is simply not possible to back up all data and keep it safe. “Sometimes it’s better to go back to the -40 F freezer and repeat the experiment.”What's hot now? He offered virtualization as the “lowest hanging fruit.” Not coming soon,

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