Two weeks ago I started my new job as a post-doctoral researcher at Northern Kentucky University. I’ll be working in the Barton geomicrobiology lab doing bioinformatics. I’m looking forward to being a bioinformatician in a microbiology laboratory and I think the combination of computation and wet skills in the lab complement each other.
I’ll be working on doing comparative genomics of Pseudomonas species isolated from cave environments. Microbes growing in caves often have limited rRNA similarity with existing characterised microbes and a low rRNA similarity is indicative of a correspondingly low genome similarity. Several Pseudomonas soil and human pathogen species have already been sequenced which means the genomes of cave Pseudomonas can be compared with the genomes of sequenced Pseudomonas species.
My PhD at Manchester was in the area of systems biology and molecular evolution so the position here will be a chance for me to learn new skills in genome assembly and annotation. As my first post doc I think it’s also important for me to publish and establish my career as a scientist. Furthermore I will have to think about what direction I want to take my career and what I want to spend the next several years doing.