[No. 182] Kris Popendorf

Although I am from the United States, I followed a long and winding path, studying computer science before moving into the field of life sciences information in Japan, where I earned a Ph.D. in Science. Ever since I was little, I enjoyed writing my own stories and games on the computer using BASIC and HyperCard. Later, I learned C for the first time to develop a MUD using an old 2400 bps modem. I also enjoyed studying languages, so after learning French, I wanted to study a language more distant from English and took up Russian in high school. Then, after entering university, I began studying Japanese. When I participated in an exchange program at Keio University, I happened to take Professor Sakakibara's bioinformatics class, where I learned about his research on modeling miRNA using stochastic context-free grammars. I found this combination of biology and information science to be quite interesting, so I decided to apply for the master's program.

I entered the regular master's program for general students, not the one specifically for international students, so most of the required and optional subjects were taught in Japanese. There was a period when I struggled desperately to catch up on material I had never studied in Japanese before. When I was in trouble, my kind friends in the same lab would help me out, and they saved me many times. The concept of a "zemi" (seminar) was also new to me. When I was in a lab as an undergraduate in the US, we had time to discuss our recent research progress, but we never had weekly sessions where everyone in the lab would read and dissect new papers, so it was a great experience. At the time, I was only thinking about a career as a researcher, but looking back, I realize that the process of meticulously reviewing research plans and results, and discussing and probing for things other researchers might have missed, unexpectedly helped me hone skills that are also important in the corporate world.

While the single theme of my research was "comparative genomics," it was connected to quite a few different fields. I was able to participate in projects on decoding the natto genome, the movement of chicken centromeres, and the regulation of the marmoset immune system. This made me realize once again that sequence analysis is a topic with an incredibly broad range of applications!

It was a very enjoyable time, being able to participate in many different projects. I imagine it made it difficult to consolidate my work into research usable for my doctoral dissertation, but it was an invaluable experience!

Around my fourth year, I was contacted by Google and did an internship there. I never thought I would become a professional programmer, but after actually doing the internship, I felt that the fundamental nature of the work might not be so different from research in life sciences information (although the objectives and the way funds are managed are very, very different). Life sciences information deals with initiatives related to biology, but in my opinion, Google treats all possible mysteries of our internet-connected society as research topics. I realized that both involve repeatedly applying the scientific method to investigate the inner workings of incredibly complex systems through experimentation, in order to make it possible to do things that were previously impossible, even if just a little bit. I am still at Google, on a natural language processing research team, and I am still advancing my work in sequence analysis.

I had many good experiences at Keio University. Among them, the one that had the biggest impact on the direction of my life was building bonds with people. Thanks to this, I came to believe that if we support each other and move forward together, we can change the world.