Last month, Adina Howe took up a post at Iowa State University in Ames. Officially, she is an assistant professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering. But she works not in the greenhouse, but in front of a keyboard. Howe is a programmer, and a key part of her job is as a ‘data professor’ — developing curricula to teach the next generation of graduates about the mechanics and importance of scientific programming.
Howe does not have a degree in computer science, nor does she have years of formal training. She had a PhD in environmental engineering and expertise in running enzyme assays when she joined the laboratory of Titus Brown at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Brown specializes in bioinformatics and uses computation to extract meaning from genomic data sets, and Howe had to get up to speed on the computational side. Brown’s recommendation: learn Python.
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