I'm a programmer doing bioinformatics in the Cheung lab.
I work in a lab that is looking for effects of SNPs on gene expression. We have used linkage analysis and population association towards this end.
More recently, I've worked on genotype inference.I implemented an approximate nearest-neighbors
algorithm in Java (and later re-wrote it in OCaml.) A better tree
structure to use would have been
cover trees, which can find nearest
neighbors exactly, or approximately with known error bounds.
I'm a fan of functional programming languages such as Objective Caml (OCaml), which can express many programs clearly and concisely, and (often) run at near-C speeds. Even when I'm not using a "functional" language, but instead something like Java, I tend to try to write things as much as possible in a functional style.
I've done some attempts at implementing a probabilistic programming language, in hopes of making it simpler to develop new probabilistic models.
I play some piano and violin, especially violin/fiddle for English and Scottish country dancing.