JAX hires new computer scientist
JAX® NOTES Issue 513, Spring 2009
Overwhelmed by the exponentially increasing volume of biological information hidden in computer databases? Help is on the way in the form of new JAX computational biologist Matthew Hibbs, Ph.D.
Dr. Hibbs' main focus is to make the mountains of genome sequence, gene expression, and similar data more accessible to scientists. At JAX, one of Dr. Hibbs' first projects will be to improve the scope and accessibility of the Gene Expression Database (GXD).
Although Dr. Hibbs initially majored in computer graphics at the University of Texas, he changed to computational biology after attending a bioinformatics seminar: "I saw how you could really understand diseases using computer science tools. Contributing to cancer research became much more appealing to me than figuring out how to make hair move more realistically in movies like "Shrek"." Dr. Hibbs went on to earn his Ph.D. from Princeton University, where he was recently a postdoctoral research assistant.
