Early Indications: I always wanted to be a scientist, the question was, what kind? For a long time in high school I saw myself becoming a medical doctor, but when I wrote my first computer program as a college freshman I got hooked on computer science.
Pivotal Paper: My most thrilling, accepted paper was a computer science paper from the 1994 conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB) (T. Gaasterland, J. Lobo, "Qualified answers that reflect user needs and preferences," Proceedings of the International Conference on VLDB, Santiago, Chile, 1994). It was about the computational methodology underlying a new approach to genome annotation, which has since become the standard approach. Having the paper accepted meant that not only was I on track with a biologically important problem, but the solution was interesting to computer scientists.
Mentors of merit: When I was first considering a move into applying computer science to problems ...
