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For Students
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Bioinformatics group at School of Informatics This is the web site where you can locate core members of the bioinformatics group and kind of research we conduct. Good starting points for bioinformatics research If you would like to pursue bioinformatics-related research and have a computer science background I recommend you start with these two papers. They will give you a nice overview of the problems in bioinformatics and should be a must read for any bioinformatics student. Hunter, L. Molecular biology for computer scientists. Artificial Intelligence for Molecular Biology, Ed. L. Hunter, pp. 1-46, AAAI Press, 1993. (pdf) Cohen, J. Bioinformatics-an introduction for computer scientists. ACM Computing Surveys, 36 (2), pp.122-158, June 2004. (pdf) A fairly comprehensive overview paper on the machine learning approaches is by Jain and colleagues. Jain, A. K. et al. Statistical pattern recognition: a review. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 22 (1), pp. 4-37, January 2000. (pdf) Check out this excellent set of tutorials on machine learning by Andrew Moore. What programming languages you should know As you could expect, in addition to biology, bioinformatics requires substantial understanding of computer and information sciences. This also includes programming experience. Typically, you will be developing new approaches for which knowledge of script languages is essential. If you are comfortable with Matlab, Perl, Python or Ruby (in alphabetical order) you will be in good shape. You should also have basic familiarity with databases. Every now and then you will want to do things fast, so good knowledge of C/C++ will give you an edge. Funding and expectations Typically, we like to see how well you fare in the bioinformatics courses before we will consider you for research funding. This may be one semester or two semesters or even more. There is competition out there, so please do your best. If you are interested in my research and feel you can contribute to it, feel free to contact me. If you are interested in a research project, my expectations are that your work is of high (publishable) quality, even for the master's students. Many students are sometimes surprised by how much work has to be put into a paper. It can go from several months to a year or two of decent work. Rarely will a quickly finished paper be worth something (unless you are really really good). I'd like you to be open minded and curious. Try always to make things better. Read papers, read books, read articles on the internet. Take initiative, don't wait to get the tasks. Try your own ideas, many may fail but you'll be happy when some work. Make reliable programs, take extra time to debug. Always try to understand if the results you obtained make sense. Don't be afraid to ask questions. I guess these pieces of advice are telling you what the expectations are. If you are interested in a non-research related project, you will be expected to develop a high quality and professional program. As you could expect, the program should be thoroughly tested and shouldn't break easily (or ever). Letters of recommendation If you have taken at least one of my courses or if you worked with me on any scientific project and performed well, I will be more than happy to write you a letter of recommendation. Helping you with accomplishing your career goals accomplishes my career goals too. To perform "well" is subjective, I realize, but it typically means you got an A, or you completed a solid project or showed curiosity, potential and persistence. Even better if you demonstrated it all. Remember that I need to have enough positive material to write a letter that can help you. Living in Bloomington Here is a link from the Department of Biology. This is a great link from Mookie Baik's web site. Nice pictures, Mookie! Last modified: December 06, 2007 |