The BioInformer nr. 6, 2000 --- Arek Kasprzyk




	A publication of EMBL - Outstation Hinxton, The European Bioinformatics Institute

Arek Kasprzyk

Scientific Programmer

E-mail: arek@ebi.ac.uk

I graduated from the Medical Academy Lublin, Poland in 1991.
Soon after, I was offered a research position in the Department of Haematology at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine in London.
Without too much thinking and any chance to test my newly acquired skills I decided to take up this position. The idea was that a short period of research experience will help to speed up my career in Poland. This short period of research experience turned into PhD
in molecular diagnosis of leukaemia a few years later.

After completion of my thesis I worked in the UKCCG database in ALL as a postdoc trying to coordinate a screening program for UKALL patients involving over 30 cytogenetic laboratories in UK and Ireland. The job did not prove to be as exciting as it sounded and I decided that there was a time to change the direction slightly.
In September 1999 I was awarded a MSc in molecular modelling and bioinformatics at Birkbeck College.

Two months before my graduation I was hired to work as scientific programmer on Ensembl - a software system for automatic annotation of eukaryotic genomes.
The reason for this has been puzzling me ever since: I did not know anything about sequence annotation and my programming experience was non-existent.
Anyway, here I am writing some visualisation code for Ensembl and trying to set up collaboration with various cancer related institutions.

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