Bio-Microsoft

Drew Purves had been a postdoc at Princeton University for almost five years when he saw a weird job advertisement in August 2006. He and his companions in Stephen Pacala's lab were the techies of the ecology world, building mathematical models of forest ecosystems. Weaned on a Commodore-64 computer and the BASIC programming language in the 1980s, Purves spent his PhD nurturing virtual Arabidopsis plants and encouraging them to battle for sunlight on his computer hard drive. So it was with much amusement that he and his colleagues passed around this advertisement calling for an ecologist at the office of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England. As Purves remembers it, they remarked, "How weird is that?" Then it got even weirder: Purves took the job.