Scientific snapshot

The Guardian ran a day-in-the-life piece today covering a typical day for university scientist. It’s fairly spot on, though the accompanying photograph indicates the researcher clearly needs MOAR SCREENZ and there’s much more cake and much less emailing in the day than I would have expected.

My day yesterday was quite typical too – a constant battle to stay on top of emails interspersed with various meetings and prepping some slides for this week’s class. It meant that I didn’t have time for any data analysis (I didn’t even pee til about 3:45), but I’m hoping to launch a couple of big jobs on the cluster today as well as possibly maybe think about sorting out the MD5 checksum error that has been plaguing a recent ENA submission.

I am also in the final stages of planning next week’s little hackathon in Oxford – Genome BC and Genomics England recently signed a genomics data-sharing MOU, and Derrick Crook and I are jointly leading the infectious disease genomics pilot project. We have a few goals, including tweaking aspects of a mycobacterial genomics pipeline as well as designing an intuitive, interpretable report to share TB genomic data in the public health lab context (and that also happens to be regulatory-compliant). We’re tackling the pipeline work first with a little in-person hackathon next week, so I am flying over to the UK tomorrow night to launch that, as well as attend the Microbial Genomics editorial board meeting and be on a panel about data sharing at the Microbiology Society conference.