The summer after my second year at Carnegie Mellon University, I was living in New Orleans and had been hired at Starbucks but they wouldn't schedule me for training. As I had no money, I applied to a few labs that were looking for remote biology students or anyone with a little programming experience, since I'd just written a bunch of python and javascript stuff for Golan Levin's Drawing with Machines course (this is me). I only heard back from one lab in a field I knew nothing about, read one of their papers, interviewed, and joined the following week.
I worked for three years in the Mohimani Lab as an undergraduate research assistant, then for one year as a research associate in the same lab. I spent most of my time working on things related to seq2RiPP, a genome-mining pipeline for predicting ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs) written in Rust. The first thing I did for the lab was collecting, fixing, and otherwise implementing chemical modifications for graph-based molecular data. These modifications simulate activity by biosynthetic enzymes identified via HMM search. I've done a fair amount of other large-scale data collection/validation, but the first time was probably the most fun. Over the course of the next three years I picked up pretty much everything I know about computer science and working with computers generally.
As for my biology background, I had a really good high school biology teacher, Nhan Pham, who really encouraged me to pursue biology. I didn't listen, because I applied to every school for environmental engineering, but I ended up back in biology anyway. Good thing, because I would have hated environmental engineering. I took a fair number of wet lab courses while at CMU, but my favorites were Organic Synthesis and Analysis and Experimental Techniques in Molecular Biology.
In 2024 I was accepted into the Joint Carnegie Mellon-University of Pittsburgh Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology (CPCB) where I am co-advised by Robin E. C. Lee and David Koes.