Q: What does your job entail? What do you find exciting about it?

I’m a Lead Data Scientist in the UniProt team. I conduct research and development in the intersection of data mining, big data, machine learning and bioinformatics. I’m responsible for adapting and creating new technologies for descriptive and predictive purposes for protein data analytics, especially for functional prediction. 

The most exciting thing about my role is the challenge of using the machine intelligence to understand the nature intelligence. The road is still long to go..

Q: What attracted you to this role?

It was a natural continuity to my MSc and PhD that were both in the context of leveraging AI to address biological questions. But it’s not only that. Working in the EBI and specifically in the UniProt team is the dream of everyone involved in Bioinformatics.

Q: How long have you been working here? 

Nearly nine years, upgrading in roles and responsibilities. I can’t believe they passed this quickly ! It’s been a magnificent experience that provided me with the required hard and soft skills to tackle higher responsibilities elsewhere.

Q: What was your background before you joined the team?

As I previously mentioned, My MSc and my PhD were in match with my role in the UniProt. My main background is in AI and Data Science, but the nature of data (DNA and proteins) I’ve been working on, allowed me to enter the Bioinformatics spectrum and enjoy working on areas where AI could help, such as data encoding, classification, information retrieval..

Q: How have you integrated in the team?

Being an extrovert person, I didn’t find big difficulties to integrate the team as I always take the initiative to introduce myself. The other members were also so kind to help me explore the work environment and Cambridge city as well. I learned the communicative patterns of my colleagues as I do with data haha. It’s really amazing how culturally different and professionally complementary we are.  

Q: What do you like about working here?

It would be easier to answer the opposite question, i.e. “What don’t you like about working here” haha. If I just ignore a few things like weather, homesickness, and lack of genuine Mediterranean food, then everything else was great and productivity-boosting. I especially like the cultural richness in the team, the collective activities, the knowledge exchange, the smoothness in managing agreements and disagreements.

Q: What are some of the most interesting projects you worked on?

I can name a few:

– ARBA: a fully automated system based on machine learning, to annotate TrEMBL data with functional predictions. It gave a considerable increase in terms of coverage in shorter runtime.

– CROssBAR: a Comprehensive Resource of Biomedical Relations with Deep Learning and Network Representations to address the limitations related to data diversity and connectivity in biological data resource.

– PredComp: A tool for comparing and benchmarking protein annotation predictions of the newly developed systems against UniProtKB.

As well as other different projects that all required the collaboration of various kinds of expertise.

Q: What advice would you give to someone who was applying for a similar role?

If I may give any advice that would be “keep listening to your data by continuous exploration, live with it and you will always discover surprises, you will enjoy it and you’ll be able to handle most of the questions about it.. Within all this, be humble, we always ignore way more that what we know.”