- #1
William Ray
Retroactive introduction from a new member who joined to get some different perspectives on how to explain uniform motion to a HS Physics instructor.
By education, once upon a time I was a physics undergraduate, and had the wonderful experience of being one of the last undergraduates to be mentored by Phillip Jastram of the Ohio State University Physics department, and subsequently spent quite a few years volunteering in the lab of Carl Nielsen (also OSU).
Somehow I ended up with an undergraduate degree in Mathematics instead of Physics (long strange story of bullheadedness on my part), and then started a graduate degree in Computer Science. This was back when we drew pictures on the screen one pixel at a time, in crayon, and walked uphill to school, both ways, with the sun beating relentlessly down while we trudged in the waist-deep snow...
Additional bullheadedness saw me leaving the Computer Science department with a MS and entering, since I'd never had a class in the biological sciences in my life, the Biophysics graduate program. By some minor miracle, I finished this one.
By training as a Biophysicist, I'm a wet-bench biophysicist who was brought up in a Microbiology lab, interested in macromolecular structure and interaction. Somewhere around my 6th year as a Biophysics PhD candidate, one of my lab-mates decided to clean the -70C freezer and left my library of over 200 verified clones sitting out on the bench for a week. This was back when we made our own Taq polymerase, and sequencing was a few-hundred bases at a time, with S35 and giant film sheets. Those 200 clones were at least a couple year's day-and-night work in the lab, so pretty much over night, to save both my sanity, and my lab-mate's life, I became a computational biologist.
Since that time, over a rather strange road, I've drifted largely into the realm of data visualization, targeted at improving the amount of knowledge that can be extracted from computational simulations of macromolecular interactions, and other similar data with "interacting features". My official hat says that I'm an Associate Professor of Pediatrics, though you shouldn't take that to mean that I know anything at all about Pediatrics - the road has been strange...
I've joined PF because I find, after a handful of decades, that many things that I once found to be intuitively clear regarding Physics, have started to require effort to understand, and, at the same time I have a child in a High School Physics class, where the instructor's understanding of basic physics leaves a bit to be desired. Attempting to help her with my brain in its current state is difficult, and I'm hoping this community may help me dust the cobwebs off.
Best wishes,
William Ray
Associate Professor of Pediatrics, The Ohio State University College of Medicine
Director, Computational Biology Division, OSU Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Biophysics
By education, once upon a time I was a physics undergraduate, and had the wonderful experience of being one of the last undergraduates to be mentored by Phillip Jastram of the Ohio State University Physics department, and subsequently spent quite a few years volunteering in the lab of Carl Nielsen (also OSU).
Somehow I ended up with an undergraduate degree in Mathematics instead of Physics (long strange story of bullheadedness on my part), and then started a graduate degree in Computer Science. This was back when we drew pictures on the screen one pixel at a time, in crayon, and walked uphill to school, both ways, with the sun beating relentlessly down while we trudged in the waist-deep snow...
Additional bullheadedness saw me leaving the Computer Science department with a MS and entering, since I'd never had a class in the biological sciences in my life, the Biophysics graduate program. By some minor miracle, I finished this one.
By training as a Biophysicist, I'm a wet-bench biophysicist who was brought up in a Microbiology lab, interested in macromolecular structure and interaction. Somewhere around my 6th year as a Biophysics PhD candidate, one of my lab-mates decided to clean the -70C freezer and left my library of over 200 verified clones sitting out on the bench for a week. This was back when we made our own Taq polymerase, and sequencing was a few-hundred bases at a time, with S35 and giant film sheets. Those 200 clones were at least a couple year's day-and-night work in the lab, so pretty much over night, to save both my sanity, and my lab-mate's life, I became a computational biologist.
Since that time, over a rather strange road, I've drifted largely into the realm of data visualization, targeted at improving the amount of knowledge that can be extracted from computational simulations of macromolecular interactions, and other similar data with "interacting features". My official hat says that I'm an Associate Professor of Pediatrics, though you shouldn't take that to mean that I know anything at all about Pediatrics - the road has been strange...
I've joined PF because I find, after a handful of decades, that many things that I once found to be intuitively clear regarding Physics, have started to require effort to understand, and, at the same time I have a child in a High School Physics class, where the instructor's understanding of basic physics leaves a bit to be desired. Attempting to help her with my brain in its current state is difficult, and I'm hoping this community may help me dust the cobwebs off.
Best wishes,
William Ray
Associate Professor of Pediatrics, The Ohio State University College of Medicine
Director, Computational Biology Division, OSU Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Biophysics