Profile

I use computers to find relationships between proteins which are the mini-machines in all your cells.  For example, by finding that a newly found protein from a virus is similar to a protein from animals I can start to make guesses about how the virus works. Studying each protein is like a detective story with a bunch of evidence to weigh up. Although I want to track down what the protein does unfortunately there isn’t always a smoking gun.  One of the key computer methods I use is called a hidden Markov model.  Although I use them for proteins, they are also used in voice recognition software and in sonar detection (to tell the difference between whales and nuclear submarines).

All my work is computer based, so I spend a lot of time at my desk. I also look after a team of scientists so I spend quite a bit of time chatting to them about how their work is going and helping them work through any problems.  Most days there are seminars by visiting scientists to go and listen to and get new ideas. I seem to do quite a lot of overseas travel and have recently been to Tromso in Norway and to the USA, and will be visiting Kuala Lumpur and San Diego in a couple of weeks.  However my favourite day is when I can lock myself in my office without any distractions and hunt down some new interesting protein families.