Biology Beyond the Lab: Using Computers to Study Life

Learn more about Dr. Melissa Wilson’s computational biology research in another Biomedical Beat blog post. Credit: Jacob Sahertian, ASU. “You’re not going to be able to do biology without understanding programming in the future,” Melissa Wilson, Ph.D., an associate professor of genomics, evolution, and bioinformatics at Arizona State University, said in her 2019 NIGMS Early Career Investigator Lecture. “You don’t have to be an expert programmer. But without understanding programming, I can assert you won’t be able to do biology in the next 20 years.” A growing number of researchers, like Dr. Wilson, are studying biology using computers and mathematical methods. Some of them started in traditional biology or other life science labs, while others studied computer science or math first. Here, we’re featuring two researchers who took different paths to computational biology. Using Computational Methods As a Physician-Scientist Dr. Andre Holder. Credit: Emory University School of Medicine. Andre Holder, M.D., an assistant professor at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, is using machine learning and artificial intelligence to create a way to predict whether patients will develop sepsis, which is the body’s overwhelming or impaired host immune response to an insult—typically an infection, though there can be other causes. Catching and treating sepsis early can help prevent the condition’s more severe outcomes, whi...
Source: Biomedical Beat Blog - National Institute of General Medical Sciences - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Being a Scientist Tools and Techniques Bioinformatics Computational Biology Cool Tools/Techniques Profiles Source Type: blogs