2023: It's Showtime

After years of building, 2023 was the year I started showing what I’d built.

---

The Work Goes Public

EUGENe — the software toolkit I’d been developing for deep learning in regulatory genomics — was published in Nature Computational Science in 2023. That publication represented years of work: the idea, the design, the implementation, the experiments, the writing, the revision, the revision of the revision.

Seeing it in print was one of the more surreal moments of the PhD.

Talks

2023 involved more public-facing science than any previous year. Presenting at conferences, explaining your work to experts who’ve been in the field for decades, fielding tough questions — it’s a different kind of hard than writing. But it’s also energizing in a way that solo bench/desk work isn’t.

The Question Behind the Question

Preparing talks forces you to confront the question you’re usually too busy to ask: Why does this matter?

Not why it matters to the three reviewers who will read the paper. Why does it matter to the world? To a patient with Type 2 diabetes? To a clinician trying to understand why a variant is pathogenic? Answering that question clearly — to yourself first, then to an audience — is a skill I worked hard on in 2023.

Music

• Question — a recording from one of many late-night guitar sessions

---

Up next: 2024 →