[music playing]
Dan Quang: My name's Dan, and we are in the Francis Collins
lab in the NHGRI NIH, Bethesda campus.
I am a computer programmer.
I write machine learning algorithms.
Machine learning is a subfield of computer science and artificial intelligence.
So, do you know Skynet?
I have nothing to do with that.
It's all about data mining.
Biologists are always in need of new data mining programs.
What essentially a lot of these algorithms do is they can classify whether something
is a disease state or a non-disease state.
And they also tell you how much variation there is.
So, maybe you want to figure out how much of your height can be attributed to your genes.
It first began in my freshman year of undergrad when I had a great professor who realized
my potential as an applied mathematician and spent three days a week in a Starbucks with
me teaching me advanced linear algebra.
That motivated me just to get into research.
I also read Francis Collins' "The Language of God,” and after spending two years at
University of California Irvine doing my PhD in computer science doing genomic research,
I finally had an opportunity to meet Dr. Collins himself and he do a summer internship in his
lab.
The one thing that really excites me about what I'm doing is just that it's so new and
that it's so interdisciplinary.
I really can't think of too many people in the world who are doing what we're doing or
even what I'm doing at the moment, because these are new technologies that are being
made all the time.
Biologists need newer, and newer, and faster programs to do what they're doing.
In the long term, what we would like to do is understand how the genome works and how
it functions, to the point where we could just treat the cell like a car; we can take
it apart and build it back together, know it like the back of our hand.
It's what I enjoy the most.
It's very relaxing, but not too relaxing.
I do have to report to my superiors every day.
I also have to make sure I generate results and draw some very valued conclusions.
[unintelligible] Sometimes it involves me writing a new program for whatever the biologists
need at the moment, and sometimes it means helping the biologists understand how to use
my programs.
These are nine cell types that we have available [unintelligible].
Female Speaker: Okay.
Dan Quang: So, I actually get to meet a lot of great
people.
I have made some very great friends here [laughs].
I'm constantly meeting them over and over again.
What I learned in Washington, D.C. or Maryland?
Have fun with what you're doing.
Life isn't very fun if you're not actually enjoying what you're doing.
And, two, if you're going to fail, fail with style.
Science is all about constantly failing and rebuilding yourself and learning from your
mistakes.
Male Speaker: So, you're living on the edge, basically.
Dan Quang: Oh, yeah.
Male Speaker: Right on the edge.
Dan Quang: Oh, yeah.
The edge of glory.
[music playing]
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