about_me.txt

Iva Veseli

About Me

I am a B.S. Biology/M.S. Computer Science co-terminal degree student at Illinois
Institute of Technology in Chicago, IL, currently in my fourth and final year. I
am interested in research questions in computational biology and bioinformatics,
specifically in the field of genomics. Though my research and interests are
interdisciplinary and I spend most of my time on a computer, at heart I consider
myself a biologist - I enjoy programming and often write computer programs that
will facilitate my research, but ultimately it is the biologically-relevant
results of my projects that pique my curiosity and motivate my studies.

My career goal is to become a principal investigator and professor at a research
university so that I can continue to do two activities that I love - study
genomics and teach. Joining the co-terminal program to gain an interdisciplinary
foundation of knowledge in both biology and CS was my first step in preparing
for this future. As well as following standard undergraduate curriculums for
these fields, I have also had the opportunity to take advanced courses that will
be useful and relevant to my future research. These include Functional Genomics,
Bioinformatics, Machine Learning, Data Mining, Algorithms, Data-intensive
Computing, and Web Design.

I am involved in a number of extracurricular endeavors that expand my experience
in these areas. First and foremost is my work as a research assistant in Dr.
Jean-Francois Pombert's lab. There, I have had the opportunity to learn the
ropes of genomics research - from culturing and DNA isolation to sequencing,
genome annotation and assembly. My projects focus primarily on comparative
genomics of bacterial genomes, though I have also assisted with more
computational work such as the development of a SNP-calling pipeline.

In addition to research, I hone my teaching skills by working as a teaching
assistant for the Computer Science department. Depending on my schedule, I run
the lab section for one of two introductory programming courses - Introduction
to Object-Oriented Programming I (a Java course) or Introduction to Computer
Programming (a C++ course). This involves giving weekly review lectures and
discussing homework assignments. Finally, I have recently joined a group of
students who will be competing in the Student Cluster Competition run by the
high- performance computing community. We are working towards optimizing
scientific applications so that run efficiently on our custom-built cluster;
this endeavor will give me more experience with computer hardware and an
under-the-hood view of scientific computing.

I am currently applying to graduate school PhD programs in Computational Biology
and related fields.