Cryptogenomicon

Registration is open for a conference on “Biological sequence analysis and probabilistic models”, 24-27 March 2013, here at Janelia Farm. Katie Pollard (UCSF), Adam Siepel (Cornell), and I are the co-organizers. Janelia Farm conferences are small (~50 people), a nice size for conversation and thought. We’re likely to select about 15 more participants from open registration. For more information, including a current list of the invited speakers and a link to registration, see the Janelia conferences web page.

Most scientists get to have their research programs reviewed quietly behind closed doors. But if your upcoming contract review gets featured in Nature under a title “A roll of the dice”, um, is that a good sign, or bad?

Janelia is accepting applications for our 2012 summer undergraduate research program, deadline January 13. Janelia pays all expenses, travel, and a stipend for the 10-week program here at the Farm.

The program is particularly terrific for students interested in systems neuroscience, since Janelia is a neurosciency place, but there’s a wide range of opportunities, including computer science and applied physics projects. You can browse Janelia’s lab web pages at janelia.org. In my own lab, I’d be particularly interested in finding a summer student who wants to do some C coding in our HMMER codebase, exploring how well we might be able to get it to run on graphic processing units (GPUs). I expect we’d be able to set up a collaboration with engineers at NVIDIA, because NVIDIA have offered help to us on several occasions, but so far we’ve lacked the extra person-time to take them up on any offers. Should be a good summer experience for the right person, combining experience in computational biology with experience in software engineering and GPU programming.

For more information, see the Janelia Undergraduate Scholars program web page.