Early Indications: My original plan was to be a science journalist. At Johns Hopkins University I started taking science courses along with my writing classes to be a better journalist, but got sidetracked. I became interested in the life sciences and never got back to my original plan. Also, I've always enjoyed computers, even since high school. In graduate school at Harvard I became the resident computer whiz of the pathology department.
Pivotal paper: Even though I was a coauthor among dozens, the paper I'm most proud of is the human physical map (P. Deloukas et al., "A physical map of 30,000 human genes," Science, 282:744-6, 1998).
Mentors of merit: Nathan Goodman, from my graduate work at Harvard, was my primary mentor for informatics. He taught me the basic principles of object-oriented programming and integrated systems biology.
Editing as entry: I've been on editorial boards for genome research and given ...
