Towards the end of grad school, after producing the genomic resources I would use for my analysis in molecular evolution, I became growingly curious about the software tools I was employing. My interest suddenly chnaged from being in the wet lab putting together the resources to walking into the office and analyzing them on the computer. I was even starting to modify scripts people handed me down without having much experience with coding, but it was so interesting and fun! I drew inspiration from mentors whom along those days started pointing me towards other tools -my graduate advisor Dr. Amy Lawton-Rauh, was amazing at this!- and through networking at meetings I ended up chatting with the PI of a bioinfirmatics lab where I eventually took a postdoc position and things just kept getting better from there! Now I work in a lab full of software developers, and I'm a biologist putting things into an evolutionary and biologically significant context. In other words, I'm in heaven!

• Attention to detail.
• Eagerness to learn.
• Ability to communicate and teach clearly.
• Critical and creative thinking.
• A good grasp of both biology and software development.

Self taugh some (reading books on programming and doing the exercises on my own), took a few perl classes, went to a 2-week long workshop for moleclular evolutionary analyses, and taking classes at university.

• How can we best facilitate and enable genomics scientists from diverse backgrounds (ecologists, geneticists, genomicists, evolutionary biologists, etc) to test their hypothesis about genes and gene products (as well as other elements of the genome) in newlys sequenced (and usually non-model) organisms?
• How can we empower more biologists to become curators of knwoledge about genes and gene products (and other genomic elements)?
• How can we best disseminate training knowledge for biocuration?
• ... among other things.