Oscar Westesson
About OscarI am a bioengineering graduate student interested in computational sequence analysis. I studied mathematics at Univeristy of Rochester and UC Berkeley. Besides computational biology I like climbing, bicycling, harassing my lab-mates, recovering bread, and drinking tea. I used to mostly drink green tea, but in recent years I have shifted towards black tea, especially Chinese teas. Lars Barquist and I keep an impressive selection in the lab, feel free to come by and talk transducers over a cup of Golden Monkey . Though Lars has left, his tea selection remains! I am also a big fan of acronyms, especially inventing and propagating them. If you have any to contribute, please feel free: Acronym List InterestsOriginally I studied math, and became interested in computational biology during a class with Bernd Sturmfels. I am broadly interested in applying mathematical/statistical/algorithmic tools to analyze biological sequence data, particularly from an evolutionary perspective. I find viruses to be an especially interesting venue for this sort of analysis: their small, absurdly complex/sophisticated genomes demand sophisticated modeling, and they evolve so fast that we can watch their genomes evolve in a laboratory setting. During graduate school I worked on various aspects of viral genomics, modeling recombination, structured RNA, and population mutation distributions. I also worked on more general algorithms for multiple sequence alignment/evolutionary reconstruction and prediction of deleterious SNPs in proteins. My Ph D research is summarized in my dissertation (25MB PDF). |
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