Leading a Statistical Bioinformatics Lab: It's All About Finding Balance

Start of the lab: 2006 Size of the lab: Six PhD students Research field: Statistical proteomics and bioinformatics After obtaining an undergraduate degree from Switzerland, I became a PhD student in the Department of Statistics at Purdue University. From the first days in graduate school I became interested in interdisciplinary projects. My dissertation focused on a problem in structural biology, co-supervised by Prof. Bruce Craig from the Department of Statistics and Prof. Chris Bailey-Kellogg from the Department of Computer Science. In 2005, I did a one-year post-doc in mass spectrometrybased proteomics at the Institute for Systems Biology, under the direction of Prof. Ruedi Aebersold. In 2006, I returned to Purdue as a faculty member in the Department of Statistics and the Department of Computer Science, and started my own statistical proteomics and bioinformatics lab. Now the lab has six members, all PhD students, as post-docs and staff scientists are less common in our department.