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My name is Jeremy Debarry and I'm a research scientist and doctor at Jessica Kissinger's
lab at the University of Georgia.
So I'm actually going to be a senior bioinformatics analyst on the project as
well as an IT coordinator
and so, my role is really going to be twofold working with the University of
Georgia team as well as the other cores,
in order to provide both a platform for data exchange, so that we can get data
into and out of the other cores and everyone can share data,
and then on the actual biology side, we're going to be developing tools and
resources, so that we can ask biological questions about the data that the cores
are generating
and help them at their own biological questions as well. So systems biology as
the name implies at least to me, and this is a little more
the bioinformatics perspective, is the ability to look at
a broad range of what an organism is doing. In this case it's the host-pathogen interaction
question, right and so we want to be able to ask questions not about
one gene, one sequence, or one protein, but about really broad aspects of parasite
biology and host biology, and that interaction,
and so what we're gonna be doing is looking at proteomic data, functional
genomic data, lipidomic data, all of these different,
all mixed types of data, to try to form, really using
bleeding edge technology, as complete a picture as has ever been seen
of exactly what is happening at many different levels as the host in the
parasite interact with one another.
I actually started purely as a bench scientist and I remember when I first
got asked if,
on my very first small bioinformatics of Segway, if I was a Mac or PC person. I
absolutely, I didn't even know the difference.
But really getting a little bit of training in bioinformatics
I realized very quickly exactly how much power
the methods provide and how we can ask
biological questions that can't be easily asked at the bench, but more
importantly we can provide perspective, so that experiments being done at the
bench, in vivo, in vitro,
we can actually help them place their experiments in context, as well as
providing leverage to make the most use of everyone's time
and so, I started off looking at genome evolution which is very interesting, but
one of the reasons that I got into genomics at all, is because I believe
it's one of those fields where
the time that you put into it is really worth the pay off,
especially in the sense in being able to help us understand the world around us
and in the sense of the mapping project, to be able to understand you know this
particular disease pathology, so that we can actually use, what in my case, what
I've learned,
to help people and actually hopefully make an effect in their lives.