Post-Doctoral Fellow and Bioinformatician
Department of Behavioural and Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna
Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology, University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna
I started my career in ecology (Bachelor of Science and Master’s thesis projects), but I worked on conservation genetics of gopher tortoises for my PhD at Louisiana State University. During my PhD, I developed computational skills in bioinformatics and have further improved on those skills in my postdoctoral work. I consider myself a tool-manipulating primate (i.e., I am not a hard-core programmer), rather than say the people that develop bioinformatics programs (the tool-making primates), or those unable to modify already-available bioinformatics programs (i.e., tool-using primates). I am not restricted to any particular programming language and sometimes use many tools and languages combined together to get the job done.
I do mostly bioinformatic analyses nowadays, and jobs can vary from genome assembly, genome annotation, variant calling, differential gene expression, genome-wide association analyses, and everything in between. I love testing bioinformatics programs through simulations, but remember all simulations are wrong- just some are more useful than others.
Main current project: Stopover biology: How does ghrelin mediate migratory decision?.
Funded by Austrian Science Fund (FWF), grant N: P31037-B29.
fusanilab 