My inspiration for starting computational biology research was my frustration with trying to incorporate my mathematics training into something I felt was meaningful. It was strange for a mathematician to want to do experiments and answer complex biological questions, when he/she only had taken a few biology courses. However, I enjoyed this challenge. I felt my approach separated me from peers and would allow me to have a flexible career field in the future.

• Willingness to learn the biology
• Ability to communicate your research to multiple fields
• Openness to computational and experimental techniques (learning them/applying them)
• Stay abreast of relevant areas to your research
• Take full ownership of your research regardless of the interdisciplinary nature of your project

The best way to learn the skills is to just dive right in! There is really no right or wrong way to learn the necessary skills and you will soon found out each person stumbled upon what worked best for him/her. For me, the first thing I did was take more biology courses in graduate school. I took some by audit, P/F, and for a letter grade. Another way I developed my skills was by attending online courses such as Coursera. I also received training from senior members of my group in a new modelling technique or software. Lastly, my experimental training was through my co-advisor's laboratory, and I worked alongside many of his graduate students and senior scientists. This helped me significantly to learn experimental techniques and design. Many experimentalists are willing to train computational biologists since the experimental component is very relevant to model construction, analysis, and usage. So I strongly encourage others to at least learn a few laboratory techniques to help them in the modelling aspect.

The great thing about the computatinoal biology is field is there are always questions on the surface of your research and many underlying questions. For my dissertation research, my question was "How does the immune response modify iron regulation in airway epithelial cells after Aspergillus fumigatus infection?". Of course this is a large question, so I first had to answer many others related to how active is the immune response in the lung epithelial, is iron regulation directly related to the fungus or to environmental changes, and without the fungus present, how does the immune response influence intracellular iron. For my postdoctoral research, my primary question is "What computational methods can be used to study airway inflammation?". I am many projects which have stemmed from this one question and each of those projects will have a different focus of Cystic Fibrosis. Some on the cellular level and others on the population dynamics level.

One thought I would like to leave to those attending SACNAS, is there are so many opportunities in the computational biology field and it is never to late to transition from another field!