Hello, and thank you for listening to the MicroBinfeed podcast. Here we will be
discussing topics in microbial bioinformatics. We hope that we can give you some
insights, tips, and tricks along the way. There is so much information we all
know from working in the field, but nobody writes it down. There is no manual,
and it's assumed you'll pick it up. We hope to fill in a few of these gaps. My
co-hosts are Dr. Nabil Ali Khan and Dr. Andrew Page. I am Dr. Lee Katz. Both
Andrew and Nabil work in the Quadram Institute in Norwich, UK, where they work
on microbes in food and the impact on human health. I work at Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention and am an adjunct member at the University of
Georgia in the U.S. Hello and welcome to the MicroBinfeed podcast. Andrew,
Nabil, and I are your co-hosts today, and we are joined by Frank Ambrosio. I
know Frank from CDC, but he is currently a contractor with Theogen. I caught up
with Frank at a conference recently, where we learned that he is going to be a
sort of traveling bioinformatician. Welcome Frank. Thanks, Lee. I want to get
into your nomadic lifestyle, but first, to give everyone a sense of who you are,
let's get to know what your non-nomadic life has been like. What all were you
doing at CDC, and where were you living, in an apartment? Just to help us get
into that, I'll kick it off with the first question here. How long had you been
at CDC, and what was your focus at CDC? My story at the CDC is interesting. I
was a member of several different laboratories while I was there. The first lab
that I worked in at the main campus of the CDC was the Division of Tuberculosis
Elimination under Jamie Posey, where I first got exposed to the way
bioinformatics was done at an extremely large scale. I was still working in the
laboratory. I was a lab technician slash microbiologist, and I was learning how
to sequence on the nanopore device that had just started to hit the scene. The
more I performed sequencing, the more I got interested in analyzing my own data.
Initially, I had been handing off my data to the bioinformaticians and looking
at the results with them after the fact, but I got really interested in how they
were doing their analyses. They actually encouraged me to start doing it myself.
I did. I found an old Linux computer that was hanging around the division, and
got all the permissions and everything to start using it. Eventually, I was
encouraged to start studying this academically. Turns out we have an excellent
bioinformatics program just up the street at Georgia Tech. Without Jamie Posey's
approval, I wouldn't have gotten to do that master's program while working at
the CDC. Big thanks to Jamie Posey for making that possible. While I was working
at the CDC, after the Division of Tuberculosis Elimination, I worked in the
Biodefense Research and Development Laboratory under David Hsu, who really
helped me develop my microbiology skills in the BSL-2. After that, I worked in
the Strep Lab with Sophie Chichoua, Leslie McGee, and Ben Metcalf. They do a ton
of sequencing. I mean tens of thousands of isolates a year. It was a little bit
different to go from a lab that does a very small number of sequencing projects
with extremely rapid turnaround time and extremely high consequences for every
sequencing run, to this more surveillance-oriented, production-level laboratory.
It was an awesome experience. I learned a lot from them as well. I also got to
use the skills that David helped me develop in the microbiology realm, laying
E-strips, doing MIC testing on various strains of strep. From there, I got my
FTE, working in the Division of HIV-AIDS Prevention under Bill Switzer and Ells
Campbell. That was actually a job I had been trying to get for a long time,
working at the CDC. What does FTE mean for our international and non-
professional people listening? That's a great question, Lee. FTE means full-time
employee. What it really means is you have become a direct hire to the CDC.
You're no longer a contractor. Getting your FTE, it was a huge honor for me. It
shows confidence in you as a scientist. It was a huge honor. It was with the lab
that I had been trying to work with for a while. This is a lab that develops
MicrobeTrace, which is a tool I had become enamored with watching presentations
on the big screen with everyone at the CDC campus. Awesome. That gives us a
really good idea of who you are, where you've come from, which is amazing.
Thanks, Lee. Maybe just along those lines, I don't think we interview a lot of
early investigators, early researchers. Do you have any tips for aspiring
bioinformaticians? Definitely. When trying to get a job at the CDC, I would
encourage early career scientists to focus on applying to the contracting
agencies. There are a ton of contracting agencies that work at the CDC. Often
people don't realize that a job through one of them is actually a job at the CDC
because of the rules about what they can put in the job description and
everything. I would absolutely encourage early career scientists to take that
route just to get as many applications in as possible in the areas that you're
interested in working. Oftentimes groups will be entirely composed of
contractors. So if you want to work for a very specific group on a specific
pathogen, you might need to work for one of these contracting agencies. So don't
focus on getting that FTE right out of the door. It will come with time. I kind
of think of it like a martial arts belt promotion. You don't focus on the
promotion. You just do the work and eventually you will get the promotion that
you want. Any tips for technical aspects of learning bioinformatics and adapting
to that field? Oh, that's a really good question. A year ago, I would have said,
go and buy yourself a sweet MacBook Pro and get as much RAM and as many CPUs as
you can possibly afford and learn the Apple terminal and all the commands and
shortcuts and focus on that route of development. Today though, after having
worked at Theogen, I would strongly recommend familiarizing yourself with a VM
and particularly I would recommend a Google Cloud VM and syncing that up with an
IDE like VS Code. And there's a lot of reasons for that. First of all, I have
had the unfortunate experience of my battery dying while being in the middle of
editing a script and lost some of the work that I was working on. Yep. That
happened to me during grad school and it wasn't terrible, but that one
experience was so traumatic that I started seeking out solutions to make sure
that never happens again. Just automatic saving and stuff like that. When you're
working on a VM and VS Code, everything is so seamless to push commits to GitHub
that it's rare that I ever lose more. I haven't lost anything so far since
taking that route. So I would strongly- Touch wood. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
Exactly. Yeah. I would strongly recommend starting from that route because
relearning your development environment, everyone has to do it a couple of times
as they progress in their development career as you switch from one IDE to
another, from one text editor to another. I guess that's not true. Some of us
are still working in Vim, but by and large, you will lead smiling. By and large,
you will eventually adopt an IDE. If you choose to go that way, I would
recommend VS Code and the Google Cloud VM as a nice, easy starting point. Yeah.
So how did you actually get into Tejan? So this brings me back to my FTE
position at the CDC. So when I was working in the Strep Lab, I was deployed to
the international task force of the COVID response. And there, I learned a ton
about international bioinformatics. I was charged with developing the
international sequencing capacity dashboard. So I got to see where are these
sequencers being distributed and what is the landscape of sequencing capacity
look like around the world? And part of what I realized is there's probably a
lot of sequencing that people could be doing that they're not doing because
they're focused on one pathogen. And that will grow with time naturally, of
course, but that's where the seed was kind of planted that I wanted to
participate in the international bioinformatics community. From there, I got my
FTE with the Division of HIV AIDS Prevention, and I was almost immediately
deployed to a local task force called the Toast Team. And the Toast Team was
headed up by Lee Katz at the time, and it was a fantastic honor to finally get
to work with Lee Katz. Lee actually presented during my first week at Georgia
Tech during grad school. So from there on out, I kind of had my eye on...
working with Lee in some way, shape, or form, and it finally happened. And then
subsequently, two days later, he rolled off the task force and we had a new team
lead, as is the nature of the pandemic response task forces. But I can check
that off my bucket list of bioinformatics collaborations. Then being on the
TOAST team, we provided technical assistance to state laboratories around the
country. And a lot of these state laboratories had started using this platform
called Terra.bio that's developed by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Immediately, I saw how this platform could be the graphical user interface for
every bioinformatics pipeline in the open source bioinformatics community. I
started having meetings with Kevin and Curtis from Theogen, and Curtis really
opened my eyes to the power of Docker containers and how they could be used to
string together tools that don't normally play nice together. And seeing how
everything could be orchestrated on Terra with a click button interface, that
really appealed to me as someone coming from the wet lab who had to go through
the process of learning to do my own bioinformatics on the command line and had
to install 15 different versions of the same tool to try and get all my
dependencies right. Seeing how things could be deployed so easily to Terra.bio
and how these long, complex pipelines made of various different tools could be
accessed with a click button interface through a web tool, that really, really
appealed to me. And I saw that Theogen was the group developing all the
workflows for public health on Terra.bio. And I became interested in doing
exactly that. And after a few conversations, I decided that was the move. And
yeah, they were looking for people. I was looking to do exactly what they were
doing. So it just worked out perfectly. So I wanna change the topic just a
little bit because you are extremely interesting as an early researcher. You've
gone through a lot of stuff. In response to what you said, it has been an honor
to work with you also, even though our time was short. One of the really
interesting things is that you want to kind of take your show on the road. And
is it okay for me to say couch surf? You wanna do Airbnb and work remotely when
many of us are basically career bioinformaticians and we have a stable home and
we wanna, and you could have this stable home and everything, and you do. And
can I just like kind of paint your apartment a little bit for the audio? You
have a nice three panel painting on your wall, a map of the world, beautiful
apartment with fireplace and a nice couch and everything. Why would you wanna
leave all this behind? So yeah, that's a great question, Lee. One of the major
sectors of growth we saw during the pandemic was actually home remodeling
because so many people decided, if I'm gonna be here all the time, I'm going to
make my home office amazing. And I kind of fell along those same lines. I now
have two more screens than I had at the beginning of the lockdowns. And I have
multiple laptops and everything here. I could do this job from here, no problem.
But the reason I want to travel, the reason I want to go and do, as you said,
couch surfing, Airbnb surfing around the world is the connections you make in
the public health community are absolutely incredible. This brotherhood of
people who are interested in promoting public health around the world, I haven't
met a single person in public health who doesn't want to help everyone in that
community. It's a really loving and accepting and warm and powerful community.
And yeah, getting to go meet people in person is a very special experience. And
I just want to do as much of that as I possibly can. Recently, I got to take a
trip to meet some collaborators in Mozambique that we had been working with for
seven weeks prior to the trip, learning genomic characterization, genomic
epidemiology, and getting to meet them in person was, in one week, we bonded
more than we had over Zoom in seven weeks. So just getting those opportunities
to have a cup of coffee with someone, sit and have lunch with someone and talk
to them about what their career interests are, you don't get that if all of your
meetings are focused training sessions over Zoom. So yeah, I want to go meet
everyone in person who I've been working with from around the world for the past
three years. So give us like a little bit of a before and after that while
you're stationed in Atlanta, you've had a routine over here. How do you think,
how's your routine now and how's it gonna change? You can have a routine when
you're living in one spot. Having a routine when you're on the road is you have
much shorter periods of regular activities, let's say. So while I was in
Mozambique, I had a routine, but that routine lasted 10 days. When I'm in New
York, I have a routine, but that routine lasts just for the two weeks I was
there. So for me, it's less about setting up this permanent established routine
and more about finding a framework. Like what things do I need to do and how can
I fit them all in? And I kind of see my calendar, my Google calendar as this,
like I've stopped writing to-do lists and I've started just using my calendar
and trying to fit in everything that I need throughout the day, whether it be,
you know, going outside for a little bit or making food, making sure I take care
of myself, but then also all the work-related responsibilities and socialization
and stuff like that. So I really try to focus on using my calendar and planning
for the week, planning for the month, planning for the quarter, and that makes
it a lot easier to not have that routine. I don't need to worry about what I'm
doing that day because my calendar will tell me. So are you planning to like
live in a van or something as you travel across the US or are you planning to,
you know, kind of live it up in Airbnbs and kind of cool locations around the
world? So the van life movement has absolutely appealed to me a little bit. I
actually know of one individual who is currently doing that very successfully.
They just have a couple of hotspots and they live the van life. That would
actually limit me to geographic regions that are connected by land. So, you
know, it does appeal to me, but I would like my area of travel to be a little
bit broader than just the Americas. So the Airbnb option, you know, most people
hear Airbnb and they think giant house on the ocean. And there are a lot of
options within Airbnb and many of them are more affordable. And, you know, you
really don't need much if you're going to be out and about working in cafes and
elsewhere. And that's really the approach that I've taken. So this is a good
time to tell my story of my first travel while working with Theogen. It was
actually during my first week of working for Theogen that I had to travel to New
York. It was my first time traveling while working without taking any time off.
We had not been issued Theogen laptops yet. So I had my work laptop that I had
bought myself. It was a MacBook Pro. And I was very nervous because I had never
made this work before. I thought that I had all the equipment, I had all my
adapters, I had a mouse that I was bringing with me, a keyboard, and I packed up
all my stuff and I stayed in a one room Airbnb. So it was just a bedroom. And I
set up my laptop and everything when I got there and I was able to hold
meetings. I blurred my background and made sure, and everything went fine. There
was nothing to worry about. Initially, just hooking up to the Wi-Fi took about
two minutes. As you know, when you get to a new place, you have to get that Wi-
Fi password as soon as possible. But after that, everything went smoothly. We
also had a Theogen hotspot on our work phone. So if anything went wrong with the
Wi-Fi, I had redundancy. I also have my personal phone, which has a hotspot. One
of the things that I discuss all the time with Kevin is redundancy, like where
do you need to have redundancy? And the first one is with your internet
connection. You can't just rely on one internet connection, you have to make
sure you have some alternative method of hopping back on the call should
everything go down. The next thing is your audio equipment. Everyone who's ever
been on a Zoom call knows the struggle of audio equipment. And you want to have
multiple options. I personally have my headphones that I'm wearing right now. I
have a pair of earbuds and I have a microphone. So three different methods. And
also I think it's nice to mix it up. Your ears can take a lot of abuse if you're
just using the same headset every single day. So mixing it up definitely helps
with the ergonomics of being on eight hours of Zoom calls a day. So yeah, while
I was in New York, I worked from this Airbnb.  worked from the pizza place right
down the street, which had their own Wi-Fi network. I worked from the coffee
place down the street the other way that had its own Wi-Fi network. And, you
know, there, when I went to visit friends, if I had to send an email, if I had
to do something, I could connect to their Wi-Fi network. So having, having the
the hotspots and having a little bit of confidence in the internet connectivity
around the region that you're in, that that helps. So I'm sure it can be a bit
lonely when you're travelling solo. So how do you avoid feeling disconnected and
integrate properly with your company? And this, this was one of the major issues
that I had at the beginning of the lockdowns. So I live alone, I don't have a
pet, I don't have a dog or a cat. And living alone during those lockdowns was
pretty rough. The opportunity to travel to me, it really led to more connections
than I would have had just staying home. That being said, I developed some
strategies that are still in place to this day. And first of all, you have to
set times to talk to people nowadays, everyone is so busy, that if you want to
have a recurring meeting with one of your friends, you should put it on your
calendar. Like it might seem weird to be putting, you know, meeting with my
buddy, Kevin, on your work calendar. But you know, it really helps to keep that
regular checkpoint. And just have those those intentional check ins with the
people that you care about. Additionally, if you get the opportunity to go visit
your family, just do it. It you know, there's there's so few opportunities to do
that nowadays. And I, I love going up to New York and seeing my family that is
still living there. And I got to do that actually, my cousin got married
recently, and I went up there for the first time in a few years, I got to see
people and it's, it's one of those things that you you don't think about it
until you're around those people again. And they're saying, wow, we haven't seen
each other in three years. And you want to let that happen as as often as
possible, go see your family, make sure that you're seeing the people who love
you and see see them in person, if you can, you know, make sure your your timing
your boosters and everything appropriately so that you're doing it safe. Take
all the precautions so that you're not getting people sick. But if you can go
see your family, do it. Much of what you're saying, Frank, I've heard other
people who were remote working from before the pandemic, you know, the OGs, they
would they would more or less say what what you've been saying. It's interesting
during the pandemic time that we've, we've lost the the water cooler moments in
work in life. And it does seem now I think we've forgotten how to do it. And you
have to do this deliberate scheduling of of times with people to really ensure
that you get the, you know, in quotes, casual conversations, they have to be
formal in the diary now. Because yeah, people are coming and going all the time.
Yeah, so related to that, I will often just put a meeting with one of my co
workers or friends. That's just, you know, my name slash their name. And it's
completely open. There's no agenda. It's what are your concerns? What are you
working on right now? What are you doing? We haven't talked we haven't had that
water cooler moment. And I, you know, I remember from my time at CDC, walking
through the hallways, and seeing, you know, all of my friends who work there.
And now, since I don't have that, I am kind of aggressive with my setting of
meetings with people if you know, if you can't make a meeting, all of my friends
know, like, just go ahead and reschedule it or reject that meeting. It's totally
fine. I will not be offended. But I feel like it's important to make that clear
to them when you start doing this. Because people see a meeting pop up on your
calendar. And, you know, unless you've explained this to them, they might be
expecting, oh, is this going to be a working meeting? Do I need to have an
agenda ready for this meeting? So I like to just tell everyone, hey, I'm gonna
put meetings on your calendar just to chat for 15 minutes about, you know, are
there any concerns? Is there anything I need to know that's not in the normal
scope of our work discussions? And I think that helps a lot. So I'm curious now
trying to read between the lines of what we've been discussing so far. Let me
place a hypothetical. If we didn't have this catastrophe of the COVID-19
pandemic, do you feel you would be making this change that you're making now?
The digital nomad, would you think you'd be trying to implement it now? Yeah, I
see why it appears that the pandemic was sort of a catalyst for me wanting to
embark on these journeys. But really, I've been focused on having a locationally
independent occupation for a long time. It's always appealed to me the idea of
being able to grab my laptop and go work in a cafe from anywhere. And one of the
most important things I remember from early on, I had a professor in undergrad,
who had described some time that they went and worked in Latin America, and they
traveled around for a bit. And I was like, how did you work from six different
countries in one year? How is that even possible? And they explained, you know,
work visas, you have to come back to the States every so often and maintain your
citizenship. And they gave me this rundown. I had never even heard of that
lifestyle before. And this professor was very successful. They started several
businesses along the way, and it just really appealed to me. So that's probably
the first moment that I started considering the digital nomad lifestyle. But
then I was in the laboratory. And I thought, you know, I love working in the
laboratory. I love thinking inside the test tube and, you know, working with my
hands at the at the wet bench working with a pipette and working with all these
cool new sequencers and sequencing technologies. And but then we got a, an
automated liquid handler. And this was the writing on the wall, I saw the
automated liquid handler. And I was like, I am never going to be good as good at
this, as this thing. I can only work so many hours in the day before my hand
falls off. And this thing can go all day and all night. And that that's part of
the impetus for learning bioinformatics as well was, you know, where can I be
more useful than I am in the lab? If this sequencer or this liquid handler can
pipette more than me and faster than me? Where can I be of use? And obviously,
at the experimental design phase, that was important, but also the analysis. So
yeah, once I started working behind the laptop more, I started really thinking,
okay, I might be able to do this, I might be able to, you know, achieve the
dream of locational independence. And once once I saw the goal on the horizon, I
pursued it aggressively, I got the bioinformatics masters from Georgia Tech. And
from there, it was just a matter of finding the right position, which I did at
the agent. So if it's not, if what you're saying makes sense, it was something
that was coming from before. Do you feel like there is a generational shift?
Because for me, I feel like I'm in the middle, I got the worst of both sides,
people who older professors were able to dig into a place and get tenure and be
fine. And then younger folks, I mean, I don't know. Like younger folks, I see on
the on, you know, my nieces and nephews, and so on. They they take to this, they
take this, yeah, I'm working here for a year, I'm working here for two years,
I'm moving around, I'm doing whatever, I'm having fun. And I'm like, I can't do
either of it. This is this is ridiculous. Yeah, I feel with your with your peer
group that this with it with people in your cohort, say, as you were stepping
through, they also are more sort of easy able to cope this this transient sort
of work pattern. Yeah, absolutely. I totally see that pattern. So I was born in
1990. I was part of the first generation to have a cell phone in middle school.
And the the idea of connectedness for me, I remember the days when you had to
ride your bike down the street to see your friends. And then I remember getting
my cell phone. And I remember thinking like, wow, I can talk to all of my
friends all the time, nonstop from anywhere I want from now on. And now, you
know, text messages used to cost like 10 cents a piece. So my mom didn't think
that. But at the time, I thought that and then with, you know, AOL instant
messenger came around and I, you know, I was fortunate enough to have a laptop
at my home when I was first getting exposed to AOL instant messenger. And I
thought, again, I am connected to everyone I want to be connected to all the
time. And yeah, I kind of grew up with that mentality. And I guess, yeah, as as
I learned more and more about these digital nomadic lifestyles, it there was
nothing that there was nothing that scared me about giving up the home base. I
really took to it. And I see it in some of my my family members who have
purchased a house and they're building a life in their community. And they say,
you know, how can you how can you travel around like that? And what about your
friends? Don't you miss your friends and  Who do you go out with when you're on
the road like this? And, you know, I make friends all over the world. I talk to
my friends who I've known since middle school and grade school on the phone all
the time. So I think the the social dynamics have really shifted in favor of
just moving around and staying connected. So are you planning to give up your
apartment or or sell it or what? Yeah, so the the eventual plan would be to sell
off all the stuff I don't need, put some of my stuff in a small storage unit
here in Atlanta, maybe use one of those mobile storage units like pods where you
can have the whole storage unit shipped to another location and just go from
Airbnb to Airbnb around the world. Now, I got to tell you, an Airbnb in Lima,
Peru costs more than my rent does here in Decatur, Georgia. So it it's actually
cost effective to stay in these Airbnbs rather than having an apartment. So my
plan is I will keep this apartment through next summer. And at that point, it's
going to be all traveling all the time. I should point this out. You might
actually have when when when this one's Lee, I always pronounce the Decatur. Is
that wrong? Yeah, we it's Decatur. Oh, my God. I've been pronounced you you win,
Lee. For once, I've said it wrong. I win. There's a salmonella serovar called
Decatur that I see from time to time. So you say I kept saying Decatur. We have
a locality. We have a serovar here. Who discovered that one? I don't know who I
don't know if if there's another Decatur, but the you know, it's probably a
common city name, but there is a serovar called Decatur. We have a few different
indicators in the U.S. And I and I don't know if anyone mispronounces it. I
definitely hear the mispronunciations over. I don't know, like over tech support
calls or whatever. That's hilarious. This is a tangent, but oh, my God, when I'm
not going to give away if and when I can't give you so much. I can't give you so
much grief about mispronouncing Norwich. I mispronounce it every episode now.
It's great. I'm not going to give away if and when you're visiting, but like if
and when you visit. You're reminding me, I'm going to I'm going to have a field
day with you guys now. I'm going to try to bring up all the names. This is going
to be great. No, but that sounds that sounds really well-formed as what you're
saying, Frank, in terms of a lifestyle like it makes it does make sense when you
when you put all of those pieces together. It does make sense. It is like it is
it is sustainable and it is sort of sensible in a way. At the beginning, you
sort of mentioned a lot of people of, you know, in terms of education and
mentoring, and you would have been doing this all on site with within CDC
positions. Now, how would that be possible in a digital nomad space? I mean, you
touched on catching up with people over the phone and virtually. But to me, that
seems to be possibly one of the weaknesses that you're not embedded with people
for a long time to to get exposed to some great experience. Yeah. And, you know,
this this was actually a concern of mine. I was very fortunate to be mentored by
the people I was mentored by at the CDC and at every level. These are people who
I all still look up to as mentors and would love to be able to see on a regular
basis. I think one of one of the tactics that I've come up with for maintaining
relationships is find a project to work on with someone that you want to
maintain a relationship with. And and for me, forming relationships is much
easier if we have a common goal and something something to work on every week
and milestones to achieve. And one of the most recent collaborations I've worked
on has been with David Hess from the Nevada State Public Health Lab working on a
candida outbreak in that region. And, you know, David and I, we live like twenty
five hundred miles away. It really would be impractical for us to see each other
in person on a regular basis. But we have a checkpoint every week where we meet
and we discuss the project that we're working on. And I got to tell you, it has
been one of the most rewarding mentor mentee relationships that I've ever had.
So I, you know, I haven't met David in person yet. We're actually going to meet
for the first time in person at ASM NGS. So this is this is the new way is you
can form these relationships digitally. You can maintain them by working on a
project, working towards a common goal, and then you can meet each other at the
conferences, which, you know, thank goodness for these conferences starting back
up. I think that's, you know, going to be really helpful for facilitating the
maintenance of these relationships long term. Well, you're speaking to the choir
here, Frank. Actually, I think most of our interactions for the podcast with Lee
over in the States is is totally online. And we only we only met up, what, at
the other month, really. That's exactly as you're saying. So, yeah, no, I
totally agree with that. I had one final question before we wrap up, and this is
sort of throwing it open to everybody. What you're sort of talking about is this
more agency model where you're moving around, you're working freelance, or I can
see things like, say, with Theogen or with other companies or core
bioinformatics services where you're sort of a gun for hire and you're kept on
retainer within a group, but you're not actually embedded in the organization in
a specific university or anything like that. I'm wondering how everyone feels
about this. Is this what we're going towards as a working model for the field
that we're sort of this gun for hire, working remote if needed, tapping in and
out? One day you're working on one project. One week you're working on another
project and switching around. Is that what we're moving towards in
bioinformatics? Yeah, I I think that, you know, rather than looking at it as,
you know, I'm just one person who you can hire to help with bioinformatics, I
would be much less effective without the Theogen team behind me. And I think
that really illustrates the model a little bit better is you have this team of
bioinformatics scientists, genomic epidemiologists and then project coordinators
who can very quickly come up to speed on a project and immediately start
helping, start contributing. And we see this over and over again with our state
public health lab partners. We can very rapidly start being effective with a
project when we start a new collaboration with a state public health laboratory.
And we kind of take the approach of a practitioner led research and development
model. So anything that they're working on, we gear our entire development
trajectory towards the needs of our collaborators. And typically what ends up
happening is the needs of one collaborator meet the unknown, unforeseen needs of
another collaborator. So we are we are developing in many different directions,
but every direction that we develop programs helps multiple different
laboratories. And I think that, you know, that kind of breaks the old model of
having one bioinformatics scientist per group who develops all of their analyses
and has to do all of the bioinformatics in a bubble. And now it's I'm working
with genomic epidemiologists during the development path. So it doesn't get to
the end. And I've developed this nice bioinformatics pipeline that the results
of which I have to then interpret for the genomic epidemiologists by
collaborating through the entire development period. We we make something that
works for everyone. I mean, the agency for I feel like. This is it's almost like
it's a kind of continuation of what we've been doing, unfortunately, Frank
mentioned the FTE thing at the beginning of this. For better or worse, we hire a
bunch of contractors or we hire fellows or whatever who are not actually
employees of CDC, and that's to help us maintain flexibility and everything.
And. And maybe this is just a continuation, I I kind of see a bright future
where the Internet and all these technologies are kind of helping us find more
and more intelligent people to help us on our missions. And and these people
like Frank bid for a contract at CDC or. Or they can bid for a contract
somewhere else. And and I think it's kind of when when it maintains flexibility
like we've wanted for a long time while maintaining the expertise. I think it's
I think it's probably a good thing. Yeah, I agree with that, Lee. I think, you
know, I draw a lot of lessons from my time on the Toast team, seeing how, you
know, you can you can have these collaborations between state public health
entities that would have not interacted, if not for one central group bringing
them together like the Toast.  team was. And like we do at Theogen in different
ways. The Staff B community has been amazing at this. And I think that, you
know, we should definitely acknowledge that they've been doing this the longest.
They were the OGs of the state collaboration movement. But, you know, there's so
much potential to that movement, just bringing people together for these
collaborations. So what next? You know, in five years time, if we come back and
talk to you, where do you expect to be? You know, is it going to be that you are
leading your own company? Or, you know, you'll be running Theogen? Or, you know,
what is your feeling on that? So I think Theogen is doing things the right way.
I have no intentions of leaving Theogen. My role in five years will probably
shift to a more supervisory management role. But for now, I'm just focused on
making the connections around the world with public health groups that are doing
good work, performing bioinformatics and, you know, want to learn the cloud-
based technologies and the Docker-based technologies that we use at Theogen.
And, you know, we'll take it from there. Anything I could do to help the global
bioinformatics community, I'll be doing that in five years. We'd like to keep
hammering the hard questions with you, but I think we have to wrap it up there.
Can we check in with you later after you've had some time with them on
Lifestyle, especially with Andrew's question, where do you see yourself like in
five years? I am very curious where this goes to long term. Yeah, absolutely.
It's been a pleasure talking to you guys. And, you know, anytime you want to
have me back on, like I discussed earlier, whether I'm in Lima, Peru, or I'm in
Sydney, Australia, you can, you know, put a put an hour on my calendar, and I'd
be happy to chat. Awesome. Well, thanks for clearing up this amazing Lifestyle.
Thank you to all the listeners for tuning in. And we'll catch you next time on
the next episode. Thank you so much for listening to us at home. If you like
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