Dr. Titus Brown is an assistant professor at Michigan State University, with joint appointments in Computer Science and Engineering, and Microbiology and Molecular Genetics. Before grad school at Caltech, he lived the free spirited life at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon. At Caltech, he first studied evolution in the context of a "earthshine," or the reflection of light from Earth to the moon, before coming to genomics. Since seeing the light of bioinformatics, Dr. Brown has studied regulatory networks, evolution, and development, and now studies a mishmash of all of the above, glued together with genome assembly and kmer counting.
Besides being a successful researcher, Dr. Brown is also heavily involved in the Python and open source communities. He publishes much of his research to the open paper repository arXiv, with open code via iPython notebooks
(as a side note, he is also extremely responsive. I was using his lab's k-mer counter khmer
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