Who am I?
I’m a biochemist by training and that’s mostly what I’ve done for work until now, but somewhere along that path I realised I could be more useful at a computer outside the lab, than manually doing experiments on my own! So I’ve been erratically drifting towards the world of tech for last 10 years or so and this personal site/blog is part of my plan to be more systematic about this move!
I have experience with a broad range of fields and techniques, so much that I like to joke that I managed to fool a university into giving me a PhD while not being a real expert in any one topic! The unifying theme through my career has been development and implementation of methods, always with an eye towards downstream impacts, as direct economic benefits or by enabling the exploration of new research questions.
On the personal side, I am currently living near São Paulo - Brazil, a long way away from my wife who is still in London - UK! Outside of science and computers, I like to play various types of games, work on the garden and cook… so there might be a few posts on the blog relating to those topics!
That should be enough of an intro, but keep reading the extended version below if you’re brave! I do tend to ramble a bit in writing and keeping things concise is another skill I want to work on with this site…
More Information
My path towards computation started during my Master’s in yeast molecular biology, when I decided to ask the group’s bioinformatician to teach me how to do my own RNA-Seq analyses instead of handing off data like all the other wet lab researchers were doing. In that same lab, I also had my first exposure to automated liquid handling, which gave me another perspective on how computation could enable new types of experiments that were simply not feasible by hand.
For my PhD, I moved onto protein engineering, with the aim of applying the tools of directed evolution to exploit a bacterial pathway that could produce chemically-diverse molecules for future applications. That aim was a bit ambitious and we didn’t quite reach it, but along the way I had to adapt and develop a range of experimental and computational methods to find out whether experiments were working at all and what parts of the enzyme system could be targeted for engineering to improve function.
Towards the end of the PhD journey, we decided to apply for a patent on one of the methods that I developed and that gave me a glimpse into the massive (and slightly disheartening) gap between exciting bench results and convincing a tech transfer/patent office that something had commercial value! That foray into the world of tech transfer also put me into contact with the small biotech startup that I would end up working for after the PhD.
Working in a drug discovery startup was certainly one of the most transformative experiences of my career, making use of a large chunk of the scientific skills I acquired along the way and also exposing me to many new (to me) aspects of industrial work: machine learning, software development, drug target selection, hiring, project management, etc. I started out doing a lot of manual benchwork, implementing various processes needed to complete the company’s pipeline to go from in silico designed sequences to function scores for protein candidates derived from high-throughput sequencing data. As more people from a tech background joined, I started to drift into a bridging role between the various skillsets, helping to ensure communication was clear and that projects did not run into blocks because of missed requirements.
My last position was as a Field Applications and Service Specialist for a liquid handling robot manufacturer and that was a great opportunity to see how automated bench work fits into the bigger picture of production-scale diagnostics workflows.
What to expect from this site?
My plan is to start filling this space with my thoughts on the intersection of biology and tech, along with analyses made with interesting tools/techniques that I’ve approached tangentially in the past and would like to become more familiar with in the next few months.