OPIG 20th anniversary symposium
Last Saturday I attended a symposium celebrating 20 years of the Oxford Protein Informatics Group where I did my DPhil. It was great to reconnect with other alumni, including some who had come from as far away as California! I also really appreciated the opportunity to meet opiglets I didn’t know, both from before my time and after. Charlotte reflected on how her current cohort of students haven’t had the same opportunities to go to conferences as we had had in the past, and how this was an opportunity for them to network and pick our brains a little.
With this in mind, alumni had the opportunity to give a talk during the symposium on whatever topic we chose. There was a predictable focus on big data and machine learning for drug discovery, so I tried to make a point of talking about low- and medium-throughput basic research instead, and how my current job has me learning from and contributing to this very different kind of work. Mostly I wanted to talk about how cool mitochondria are.
As a speaker I was in brilliant company, and while I couldn’t possibly do justice to all 18 talks in a single blog post, I thought I would give a quick rundown of the other former opiglets who are in academia at the moment. Notice how I didn’t say “still in academia”: the symposium really highlighted how much flux there is between universities and industry, and how many of us continue to move across the two.
Bernhard Knapp is an excellent example of this. After turning down not one, but two separate permanent positions in academia and spending time in industry, he is now at the University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien, where he manages the AI Engineering masters course. Two things that stood out for me in his talk were the importance to do work that you enjoy, and not to compromise your beliefs and values.
Anna Lewis is a former opiglet I knew of by name but had not met before: we both did network biology DPhils, some years apart. After working in industry, she changed fields and is now a bioethics research associate at Harvard. At the symposium she spoke a bit about her current work on ancestry, but she’s also been thinking about the ethics of polygenic risk scoring, which is a topic I find fascinating. She also rowed across the Atlantic during her DPhil, as you do.
Sanne Abeln, now an associate professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, was Charlotte’s very first DPhil student. She gave a great talk about how “sticky” proteins with hydrophobic surfaces are over-represented in the brain, and why that might help explain amyloid formation in neurodegenerative disease. She made a point of crediting her students for the work she presented, which is something I think more academics should remember to do consistently.
Jean-Paul Ebejer is definitely an OPIG legend - even those of us who had never met him knew of him. Now a senior lecturer at the University of Malta, his talk was a delightful and funny overview of life in academia, from admin, to teaching, to research. Some of his claims to fame (or infamy) are designing the OPIG logo and starting the group’s blog. I distinctly remember discovering the blog as an undergrad, not understanding any of it, and subscribing to the RSS feed anyway. I would have been too ashamed to admit it, but I dreamt of one day being able to write stuff like that. Lol.
Tiago Rito is another opiglet who like me studied networks and is now on the interface of wet and dry lab. He is currently a postdoc at the Crick, where he works in developmental biology. Tiago gave a great talk which featured some really cool imaging and touched on a developmental component of Huntington’s disease.
Konrad Krawczyk is both a professor at the SDU and the founder of an antibody company. He mostly spoke about the latter, and in particular about the importance of having a good in-house data platform (arguably true in academia as well!). He also gave us some advice on selecting profile photos: if you think it’s cringe, so do other people.
Like other computational biology PhDs, many OPIG graduates now work in or adjacent to the biotech industry. We heard talks from people working at start-ups all the way up to big pharma. However, two slightly different speakers deserve a special mention. Eleanor Law, now at the Office for National Statistics, gave a hilarious overview of the pitfalls of population estimation, by way of sheep photos. But the talk that stood out to me the most was an unexpectedly thoughtful one by Markus Gerstel. He spoke of the importance of considering your values, and how volunteering and civic engagement can be central to finding fulfilment in life. Cheers to that.