She zips past some of the dozen staff in glass-fronted offices or workspaces formed by filing cabinets and bookshelves. Though no hulking IBMs or Crays crowd the corners of this modest basement office, it nevertheless houses the world's largest publicly available protein sequence database, called the Protein Information Resource (PIR).1 And since 1998, Wu has been its bioinformatics director.
| Courtesy of Georgetown University Medical Center |
 Cathy Wu |
For Wu, bioinformatics is an application. "You use a computer, databases, and software to help you solve more complicated biological problems." Trained in both molecular biology and computer science, she is particularly suited to cast biological questions in computational terms, so that appropriate algorithms can be written and programs developed. In so doing, Wu has made major strides toward transforming the PIR from a venerable organization struggling to cope with too much new data and too little computer science, into a burgeoning state-of-the-art ...
