Assistant Professor, Computational Biology. Age: 37
Uwe Ohler spent a year in Berlin serving meals at a homeless shelter after finishing his undergraduate degree in computer science at the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg. It was the mid-1990s, the Human Genome Project was well underway, and Ohler felt like he was missing out on something. He always took an applied approach to computer science, and he had dabbled in genetics in college, applying speech recognition algorithms to find new bits of regulatory sequence in DNA. But now he realized that he wanted to study computational biology to fully explore the intricacies of the human genome. After getting off work at the shelter in the evenings, he would walk next door to a Technical University of Berlin computer lab to fill out applications for graduate funding.
Biology fights computer viruses
METHODS: Starting in 1998, ...