A Day in the Life

There are two questions that I get asked all the time. The first question is "What is the name of your blocking board and where can I buy it from?" (The answer, it's a SpaceBoard and you can get it from KnitPicks or PatternWorks). The other is "What is a computational biologist?" Since I'm back a little late from a nice V-day dinner, I thought tonight might be a good one to pursue that second question.

The answer to this question is probably a little different for everyone who calls themselves by that label. It depends on where you are in your organizational food chain and what kind of organization you belong to. I thought it might be entertaining/enlightening to provide something of diary entry of what I do on a regular day. To begin with, it's probably important to be clear about what my title is: "Director of Scientific Operations". This means that I don't do quite as much actual science as if I had a Scientist title (I used to be "Scientist, Bioinformatics"), but because I work for a small company, I still get to dabble in my area of specialty. Because I work in a small company, I also don't take the title too seriously. We all wear a lot of hats and most of the time I just do what needs to be done without worrying too much about whether it fits in my job description. Here's how things often go for me...

8 AM -- Get up, check email (some of our customers and one of our business partners are across the Atlantic, and earlier in the morning is my best chance to take care of their questions). Breathe sigh of relief that newly upgraded server supporting a group of important customers has not generated any unhappy support request emails. But notice that there does seem to be a problem with the system that handles our new customer inquiries. Make note to deal with when at work. Find coffee.

10 AM -- Arrive at work. Yes, I know, this is later than most of you get to work. I have to take care of a number of west-coasters and 10 to 6 makes it easier for me to do this. It's one of the few luxuries I have. Make tea. Turn on computer, check email again, pick up voice mail. Make note to call US business partner about proposal we are putting together for a customer.

10:15 AM -- Launch MS Project. Plan for weekly operations meeting based on info from last week.

10:30 AM -- Restart MS Project due to some strange bug. Twice. Make notes for meeting.

10:55 AM -- Round up meeting participants (it's a small company and it's Monday...)

11:05 AM -- Operations Meeting

11:54 AM -- Realize that one more cup of tea has gotten mostly cold before I finished it.

11:55 AM -- Fix small problem with customer registration scripts on new server. Yes, a little Perl is almost an essential of my day to day life. Send emails to people who noticed the problem.

12:00 PM -- Prepare DNA sequence alignment data for one of the bioinformatics scientists for a report that needs to go out. (The four chemicals, called nucleotides, that make up DNA can be represented using 4 letters of the alphabet: A, T, G & C. Much of bioinformatics revolves around comparing DNA sequences by comparing two lists of these letters and determining whether they match or not, and if so, how close the match is.)

12:13 PM -- Send off data to scientist. Start working on customer status reports.

12:15 PM -- Investigate customer issue for business development. Revel a little bit in remembering how to use some fun UNIX tools.

1:30 PM -- Lunch and coffee at local Italian bakery. Large skim latte to go please!

2:20 PM -- Take a look at what's currently on our sequencing machines. Talk to a few lab folks about how projects are progressing. Feel generally upbeat about current progress.

2:30 PM -- Review report for customer.

2:40 PM -- Discuss results from recent sequencing project with genome assembly group. (Genome assembly is the process by which small bits of DNA sequence are turned into a long piece of DNA sequence. Sequencing machines, on average, spit out 500-700 base pair pieces while bacterial genomes are usually somewhere between 1,000,000 and 8,000,000 bases... it's a bit like putting a puzzle together without knowing what the picture on the box is and having a lot of pieces with very similar nibs and cutouts. It is both very cool and very frustrating).

2:50 PM -- Send report off to customer.

3:00 PM -- Start sending off project status reports to customers.

3:30 PM -- Discussion with heads of business development and R&D with regards to an internal research project.

4:00 PM -- Investigation of software offering by another bioinformatics company.

4:45 PM -- Send off more status reports.

5:00 PM -- Remember that I still haven't called alliance partner. Send email apologizing. Make note to call tomorrow.

5:30 PM -- Finish sending off status reports. Look back through email box trying to figure out if anything urgently needs to be attended to.

5:59 PM -- Find something that does.

6:12 PM -- Wrap up that problem.

6:30 PM -- Take one more pass through inbox. Clean up desk (or at least try...my desk has a tendency to grow piles of paper) for tomorrow.

7:00 PM -- Turn off lights, set alarm. Set off for home.

10:00 PM -- Check inbox one more time, handle a couple of emails that came in from the left coast.

And that about covers it. Somedays I do more computer-related things, other days I spend more time on the phone talking to customers with technical questions. I'm usually happiest when I'm putting little snippets of Perl together and coaxing a computer into making my life easier. But I also get a little rush out of bringing in a new contract or knowing that I helped someone get a little closer to their research goals.

The knitting related content will be back tomorrow. I hope everyone had a lovely Valentine's Day!