Goals

Last time, I said that I had clear vision of my future. I want to lay that out now, as much for my benefit as anyone else’s. I want to work in systems biology. I’m really interested in the range of interactions within a cell, and I want to contribute to applying results from high-throughput studies, such as microarray analysis, to real biological problems, primarily cancer and other diseases.

Wow, this has really turned into a personal mission statement. I’ve also realized that while I’m not currently working on anything that could even loosely be termed “systems biology,” I am studying cellular interactions, so at least I’m kinda on course.

Wikipedia is telling me there’s something called “computational systems biology,” which nominally sounds like it’s right up my alley. But when it comes down to it, I’m much more interested in applications than in pure research. So if I need to develop new algorithms, then that’s great, but if I just need to process data, then so be that’s great, too, so long as my efforts are contributing meaningfully to the research.

I’m also interested in synthetic biology, but there are two problems with pursuing this area immediately. One is that it’s still a very bench-oriented enterprise. I don’t think we’ll ever get away from that as there are just too many random factors to handle computationally. Second and more significant, it’s still a very academic discipline, and I don’t want to be an academic. I think that systems biology now will pave the way for me to enter synthetic biology later, when it becomes a field in which biotech and pharmaceutical companies are interested.

I’m very interested in working at Genentech. The biotech company was just named as the best place to work by Fortune and as one of the top twenty smartest companies by Baseline. The Fortune article sacred me off a little bit, just because I wasn’t sure if I had the passion. But after writing this little “personal mission statement”—as touchy-feely as that sounds—I’ve found that I do.

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