1. What is your current role?
Finishing up a research Masters at UTS! My project looked at benchmarking recombination detection methods for viral sequences.
2. How did you end up in bioinformatics?
“Bioinformatics” was mentioned in a final year genomics lecture as this awesome thing that used programming and computing to make sense of biological data. I hated wet lab work but loved genetics and computers, so this bioinformatics thing sounded like a dream. In brief, I was fortunate to find an academic on campus who gave me heaps of volunteer work to do. I first learnt R and programming from wrestling a complicated dataset of Australian frogs. From hearing about “bioinformatics” in that undergrad lecture, I knew that that was what I wanted to pursue, and never turned back!
3. One sentence to describe your experience with bioinformatics.
Why are there no phylogenetics talks at this bioinformatics conference/event? Or now, more accurately – Why did it take a devastating, global pandemic for more phylogenetics talks at this conference/event? 😉
4. What are the key challenges you have faced?
Poorly written methods, along the lines of “a custom python script was used to do X”, that makes it impossible to replicate what was done. On the other hand, thank you to all those who’ve written extensive tutorial blog posts on obscure methods!
5. What does a typical day look like?
It’s been a bit challenging with the (second) lockdown in Sydney. I try to start and end work days with a brisk walk, usually to the station and back to emulate going to/from work haha. In the morning I aim to work on something I’ve been stuck on, after lunch I usually run analyses. Currently working on genomic analyses of fishes and bilbies!
6. Any advice for the students who start to join the bioinformatics club?
Don’t spend too much time doing free courses – jump in the deep end and find a project or dataset to work on. Find a mentor who can point you in the right direction and genuinely wants what’s best for you. Find peers or join (online) communities to ask for help and share ideas with. The COMBINE slack channel is a great start!
7. What do you like to do outside of work?
Before lockdown, I was an avid indoor boulder-er, now it’s mainly video games. M&B Warband, Stardew Valley and Albion Online are my faves at the moment, https://garticphone.com/ with pals is great fun. Also a big fan of custom mechanical keyboards, check out my latest build:
8. Favourite meme?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Follow Fred on Twitter @fredjaya1!