Karynne Patterson
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What she does:
- She does human exome sequencing of a variety of different disease patients. It is mostly a discovery effort to find polymorphisms and distinguish between disease and non-disease mutations.
- Karynne works as part of a computational group which provides quality control metrics and manages the pipeline of data. She writes code mostly in Perl, although Java and other languages are used in the lab, and she provides statistics and data trends to the rest of her team.
Karynne's background:
- Karynne received a Bachelor of Science in Applied and Computational Mathematics (ACMS), from the University of Washington, December 2009, with an emphasis in biological and life sciences.
- Karynne says she originally wanted to be on the medicine track, and has a strong biology background, which brought her to her current lab as a sophomore. She worked there for three years as a student assistant, and then moved to the computational side of things once she graduated.
- She found the field of mathematical biology is necessary in genome sciences because the amount of data they must process is gigantic The field is really open as well. To make discoveries and use of the data they must know how to pull information out of the jumble. The skills she has learned from the ACMS degree has helped her to takle the problems she faces in the lab.
Advice for students:
- Apply, apply, apply. Getting her foot in the door was one of the best things she ever did. She has learned so much at her current position and is very grateful to have such a foundation in place as a recent graduate. She plans to stay in her current position awhile longer, and may leave when she has more experience. There are so many opportunities in Seattle and on the UW campus, and she encourages everyone to seek out these opportunities before graduating.