Travel

This year was quite eventful in terms of travel, both domestic and international. I started off with getting on a project in Connecticut, so starting the last week of January I was flying from Chicago to LaGuardia every Monday, and flying back out every Thursday. Of course this was a prime opportunity to rack up miles and hotel points, which came in handy later throughout the year. I also used my constant travel as an excuse to visit a few of my friends spread all across the US. I made stops in NYC, Philadelphia, Austin, and Boston. I also took a trip to New Orleans, which was a long standing bucket list item for me and my friend Cris. In between these fun trips, I also squeezed in a few more career related ones, including visiting Baltimore and Houston for graduate program weekends, and returning to Baltimore again for BPS’19.

The next major trip I undertook was going back home to Chisinau, Moldova for the entire month of July. It was a relaxing and fun time, and I mostly used it to unwind after a work intensive year. It also was an interim in my moving process from Chicago down to Houston. In the beginning of August, I flew back to Chicago, packed the last few suitcases (not really) and headed south.

I got to Houston mid-August, and the entire move-in process went extremely smooth thanks to my awesome roommate Robert, who helped organize common spaces in the apartment. I took another quick trip to Boston, to enjoy the last grill session of the (northern) season, and began my studies. I then also took two trips to Chicago, one for the autumn recess and one for Thanksgiving. Both trips were fun, and coming back to Chicago felt like coming home.

Finally at the end of this year I took a trip to Spain. It was an ambitious itinerary listing more than 5 cities and mostly organized and planned by Rachel. I pre-gamed the trip by spending a day in NYC, and then headed to Barcelona. From Barcelona we visited Girona and Figueres as day trips. Both trips were amazing, and I would totally recommend them to anyone spending some time in Barcelona. Then we took a train to Madrid. It was a packed schedule, and seeing Prado in one day is obviously a challenge, but we succeeded. The next stops were all in the south of Spain. Starting from Seville (with a day trip to Cordoba), onto Ronda and finally Granada, it was a route packed with great views and amazing foods. We rounded everything up by flying back to Barcelona and then in a day to NYC.

Thus, this year beings me into the great New York City! I will be heading back to Houston soon, but in the meantime, I am going to enjoy some bagels, pizza and public transport.

Work

I spent the first half of this year working on a project as a consultant with TruQua Enterprises, which involved quite a bit of travel and interactions with clients. It was an engaging opportunity to learn more about inner workings of a large business, and assist people by providing technological insights into their processes. I feel like I learned to be a better speaker and conversationalist, as well as, an attentive and active listener. Even if some days were slower or more heavy on the grunt work, I feel like I grew a lot through this experience.

In the second half of the year I have started my PhD in Computer Science at Rice University. My first semester was a combination of learning from courses and from peers in the lab. I took a great course on optimization taught by Tasos Kyrillidis. It was a mix of nice and fun math with solid practical motivation coming from the field of machine learning. I would absolutely recommend this course to anyone who has a chance of attending and is at all interested in anything mathematical or machine learning related. I also spent a lot of time working on a project in Treangen Lab, which was both stimulating and fruitful. I learned a lot of new material through this work, and strengthened some of my skills in data preparation and visualization.

Research

In the first half of this year I continued my work on the conformational transition pathways of insulin degrading enzyme and in early March I presented a poster on it at Biophysical Society Annual Meeting. It is an exciting project and it involved a lot of hours and effort both in learning and implementing simulations and analysis. I have continued this work by conducting more analysis, proposing a coarse grained model and starting out a set of swarm of trajectories simulations for determining the conformational transition dynamics of this protein. As the year progressed, I got busy with other projects and my current involvement with the project became minimal. I am currently finalizing some write ups and planning on handing over the project to the next students.

At Rice, I joined in on a project that involved graph theoretic analysis of metagenomic read data. It was my first research experience in genomics and metagenomics and I felt amazing about it. I was happy to contribute my knowledge of graph theory and general computer science to this exciting area. This project was developed in collaboration with Advait Balaji, a second year PhD student in Treangen lab. Throughout the entire process I had an amazing support from my mentors and our collaborators.

Overall, I’m happy to continue my work in the area of computational genomics and metagenomics. This is an exciting area, and I feel like I can both learn a lot and contribute significant work in the process.

As usual my research interests remain broad and lie at the intersection of mathematics, computer science and biology. I am looking forward to developing more work that can be directly applicable in both research and clinical environments, but of course that is a lengthy and complicated process.

Personal projects

This year not too many of my personal projects saw light, although I made a lot of progress on some. Overall, I feel that I carved out a few main directions for my personal work and I plan to strengthen and pursue those further in 2020.

First major initiative is exploration and adaptation of different data visualization techniques and tools. I have learned more about color pallettes and colorblind friendly design. I feel that this will make my subsequent projects more aesthetically pleasing and accessible. I also plan to round up a solid review of some basic data analysis pipelines and eventually release it as useful resource for my lab, as well as the community at large. Finally, I plan to finish up my “Where in the world” project, which was a foray into D3.js and geographic visualization.

Next, I am looking to reinforce my paper sorting and reading habits. I was meaning to organize my personal digital library for a while, but was falling short on convenient tools to do so. Therefore, I might eventually to settle either for a mix of practices and tools, or possibly write up some code myself to further streamline the process.

I haven’t worked much with Raspberry Pi or Arduino with the exception of Scav projects this year. While home automation appeals to me, I am not sure I’ll have enough time to invest into it next year, so I think most of these projects will remain on the shelf for a while.

Finally, this blog while not too active, will stay alive and will be an outlet for updates throughout the next year.

Thanks for reading, and see y’all in 2020!