Sean Eddy

Sean Eddy is one of seventeen group leaders at Janelia Farms, part of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).  These group leaders were selected because of their rare ability to pursue big questions with creativity and focus.

Sean’s current research focuses on computational genome sequence analysis.  “We use probabilistic modeling techniques to develop new algorithms to find features in DNA, RNA, and protein sequences.  One of our primary interests is in identifying novel structural and catalytic RNAs, and another is to recognize remote protein sequence homologies.”

Sean chose CU-Boulder for his graduate study.  His choices were Harvard or CU-Boulder.  Sean found that at CU, everyone was friendly and welcoming.  The recruiting dinners were fun and people told jokes.  It was clear that the faculty knew the students.  

Working and doing research in Larry Gold’s lab had a lasting effect. Sean says, “It was a fantastic time to be in Larry’s lab.”  “Larry was a great role model; I just wish I could read like him.”  Sean spoke of the impression that Larry Gold’s reading habits had on him.  “Larry has a mail tub at his house in which he collected Journal articles  - but he actually read them!” “Larry’s depth of knowledge is staggering and he has such a memory and such quick wit.”

It was a very exciting time in the lab. Larry Gold and Craig Tuerk had invented Selex.  “Larry could extrapolate from one piece of data and change the world.”

Sean mentioned that he has noticed that many of the scientists now involved in bioinformatics have come through CU-Boulder.  Sean became interested in bioinformatics because he was trying to solve an intron problem and was a Ph.D. student at the time. He was trying to solve how many catalytic introns there were on T4, around 1990.  He started in bioinformatics by creating an algorithm to solve this problem.  It was a hard problem - he solved it 4 years later while he was doing his post-doctoral research in England.  Sean was supposed to be doing research on something to do with worms, but  became interested in bioinformatics. Bioinformatics wasn’t really new when Sean switched fields, but says “It was a time when this wave of new interest was just forming, because of the impending availability of complete genome sequence.” 

Sean said “I was really lucky being in the right place, at the right time.” In Boulder, he caught the RNA wave.  When Sean was at Washington University, the wave was genomics.  At Janelia, it’s neurobiology and says he is retraining himself as a neurobiologist.

Sean remembers that the Wednesday night RNA club at CU-Boul-
der was one of the most intellectually high-powered things, he has even done
in his life.  Sean also mentioned the friendly competitiveness between the
MCDB and BioChem folks.

Sean’s advice to undergraduates about  getting into a lab is simple.
“Don’t read about it – do it!”  Sean stressed the importance for undergraduates to get in the lab and really learn about something.  “Get interested in a problem and then do whatever needs to be done to solve it.” 

Sean used to love playing this Empire game, check out this link
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/54671/