What is your favourite enzyme, and why?

Enolase, it has lots of structure/ sequence- the TIM barrel domain in beautiful!

 

What is your favourite book?

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond. It looks at civilizations that have collapsed, and how they did. They were ecologically fragile, and just required one bad season.

 

What is the most recent book you’ve read?

The Theoretical Minimum – calculus roots, and all you need to know to understand physics.

 

What is your favourite amino acid, and why?

Tryptophan because it is big , rare and easiest to detect in spectroscopy. I relied a lot on cysteines during my Ph.D. for chemical modifications. Sadly, I don’t have great memories with it!

 

What are some of your hobbies?

Making furniture. The downside is that I am too busy these days. Once that I retire, I’ll take it up again!

 

What is your dream vacation?

Road trip to NYC to see Hamilton. Also, a European tour with my daughters. But honestly as long as I couldn’t be reached: Dartmouth would be fine!

 

What is the coolest project you’ve ever worked on?

I have had many cool projects. I felt the most out of with a PhD student’s natural language processing project, wanted to extract molecular interactions from journal articles. It was difficult to get a software to do this, we had to build a grammatical tree to detect molecule names. It was very interesting and challenging.  

 

What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made in lab?

When I was doing my PhD with Dr. Wallace, I wanted to do an essential oil extraction to make Christmas presents. It was an elaborate extraction process, and clearly not very safe. The steam valve bursted, and 3 meters of steam shot across the desk of a master’s student.

 

Do you have any advice or anything else you want to say?

Students should definitely get a background in computer science! Not to become computer scientists, but to take science to the next level. I personally didn’t mean to get into computer science: you never know where you are going to end up!