#WhyIScience Q&A: How a computational biologist balances work with life as an elite rower

Tell us a bit about your research. Why are you studying autopsy samples from cancer patients?

Cancers can develop many paths to drug resistance and it’s important to understand how every cell in a cancer develops resistance. If you have a primary tumor that has a KRAS mutation, but a small cluster of cells that have a different mutation, you can target the larger group of cells and maybe you’ve killed all of those cells off, but if the smaller population has a totally different way of developing resistance, those cells can escape and continue to grow even after the first targeted therapy. When cancer metastasizes throughout the body, different areas of the body can develop different mechanisms of resistance. If we can understand how those processes work, we can better develop drugs to target these multifaceted diseases.

With rapid autopsies, you can look at a cancer’s life and see how it developed from a primary to metastatic disease. You can see the entire spectrum of the mutations, copy number changes, and expression changes that occurred at the end of life. And if, later, clinicians find a patient with a resistance mechanism previously identified in a rapid autopsy, they will have a better understanding of how that disease could further develop resistance, and maybe they will have a better idea of how to treat the patient effectively.

What interests you about the intersection between biology and computer science?

The act of discovery always appealed to me. I love that in all forms of science, you solve problems. When your code runs perfectly or you fix a bug, it feels very rewarding. You think, “I’ve created something new.”

In undergrad, I thought about going to medical school, but I didn’t want to work in a hospital. You can do a lot these days outside of the hospital and still really feel like you’re on the front lines and the cutting edge of research and be able to work on interesting problems. If you find a novel mutation that you target with a drug in a specific cancer type, you can help people in a really impactful way even though you’re not the doctor treating their disease.

What do you like about rowing?

I like the opportunity to be outside, and there are no distractions in the boat, so you get an hour or two to yourself out there. On a beautiful sunny May morning when it’s 65 degrees and the water is flat, it feels very refreshing to be out on the water. I love being a part of the rowing community, too, out on the Charles and everywhere else I have rowed. I like the feeling of progress I gain rowing in a single boat, too. You learn how to feel what you’re doing, and you can coach yourself like, “I just made a change in my body movement that made the boat go a little faster. Let’s see if I can keep doing that.” It’s problem-solving. 

I love that in rowing, every little thing adds up to a whole. Boat speed comes down to a combination of aerobic fitness, strength, rowing technique, training methods, and recovery. Sometimes it all feels like balancing a complex equation but every time I have a breakthrough, I feel compelled to go back for more.

Rowing is also very much a team sport. A couple of years ago, I was rowing in a quad [a boat with four people] and everyone had their own way of doing things. If you’re rowing together, you have to find a way to compromise, and that gets magnified when you are sitting in a boat and you have to do everything together at the same time or else nothing works. That’s important in the workplace as well.

How do you balance training and research?

As I've continued to row, it’s gotten more intense. I wake up at 5:30, go rowing for about two hours, and come home. Then I bike into the Broad and am there from 9 to 5. Afterwards I go home and do a second workout and then go to bed and do it all over again the next day. In the past few years, sometimes we’ve added a third workout as well.