IndyHall Member Profiles: Randy Zauhar
Filed under: Community Support, coworkers, From the Business Side, Independents Hall
Meet Randy Zauhaur, Professor of Biochemistry and Bioinformatics. He says this as though Biochemistry wasn’t impressive enough. Bioinformatics, now what is that?
“It’s basically applying computer information technology to biological problems.”
Sounds pretty straightforward but as usual, I needed to know more.
“As a field it ranges from trying to understand the structure of biological sequences, such as DNA or protein sequences, to what I work on which is the understanding of chemical structures.”
So how exactly does a Professor of Bioinformatics find himself here at the Hall and further, what does he do here?
“I wanted to start a company on the side and I wanted to keep my work, in some aspects, separate from the university.”
Fair enough.
“The other reason is that, like a lot of people here, as a developer I pretty much work by myself. I had a few research students who I’ve worked with that knew some programming but they never had any interest in developing truly complex applications.”
At this point I asked what kind of program he is developing and received a very scholarly response, which I will now attempt to translate into layman’s terms. Randy formulated a brilliant way to generate computer models of molecular structures and compile them all in a searchable database, an unprecedented feat. Think of each component of a molecule as a piece of a jigsaw puzzle and the entire structure as, well, you get the point. In doing this Randy has created what I like to call Google for Molecules, or Molecugle if you will. Bad names aside, Randy has found a great home here at the Hall.
“Working alone I had no contact with professional level developers and having been in the industry formerly, I really missed being surrounded by people using cutting edge technology. Immediately upon joining Indy Hall my workflow underwent some massive changes as a result of conversations I had over coffee. For example, Jason Allum turned me on to Github and it makes all the difference when you can actually see why something works so well. Also, I just missed the social interaction.”
Did I miss how he got here?
“The person that directed me here originally was Amy Hoy. I wanted her permission to use some slides she made for one of my classes and in our email exchange she asked if I was aware of the developer community in Philadelphia, more specifically here at Indy Hall.”
Thanks Amy, we owe you one.
