George Purkins, Data Jockey, Microscopy Hack

What do you do?

I work at Thomas Jefferson University for two labs. For one, I build microscopes and write the software to drive them. For the other, I analyze large biological datasets from sequencers and microarrays. My daily work involves dangerously high voltages, lasers, and gigabytes of data.

What do you wish you did?

Wrote more software, analyzed bigger datasets, and/or used bigger lasers.

Have you ever been to a BarCamp before? If so, which one(s)?

Nope, this will be my first.

If you were to lead a session, what would it be about?

Getting started with public scientific datasets. Data used by scientists to do cutting edge research is available to high school kids. Contemporary science publishing is changing for better or worse, and open data is a result of both collaboration and regulation.
Ever wonder where CSI gets all those pretty spinning molecules?

Give us one interesting fact about yourself!

I never lived more than 4 years in one place as a kid.

Got a website or blog?

Not at the moment.

Twitter?

Don’t have one.