101 Questions: a series of interviews with notable bioinformaticians

I've noticed recently that more and more bioinformaticians are talking about what it means to be a bioinformatician, and — in an ideal world — what sort of training bioinformaticians of the future should be getting. Mick Watson's Opiniomics blog in particular has a lot of great material on these subjects. One of his blog posts that talks about the disconnect between actual bioinformatics skills a student/postdoc might have and the expectation of those skills from their trainer/supervisor makes for sober reading (especially if you see all of the comments).

So I thought it might be instructive to ask a simple series of questions to a bunch of notable bioinformaticians to assess their feelings on the current state of bioinformatics research, and maybe get any tips they have about what has been useful to their bioinformatics careers.

The five questions that everyone gets asked are as follows:

  • 001. What's something that you enjoy about current bioinformatics research

  • 010. What's something that you don't enjoy about current bioinformatics research?

  • 011. If you could go back in time and visit yourself as an 18-year-old, what single piece of advice would you give yourself to help your future bioinformatics career?

  • 100. What's your all-time favourite piece of bioinformatics software, and why?

  • 101. IUPAC describes a set of 18 single-character nucleotide codes that can represent a DNA base: which one best reflects your personality, and why?