By David Ross, Master’s student at l’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)
This summer I had the opportunity to attend the Annual Conference of the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution (CSEE) in Sherbrooke, Quebec, to present preliminary work from my Master’s degree in bioinformatics. It was my first conference in over 10 years, and I was nervous to say the least…
Prologue
In the summer of 2015, I had just finished a Master’s degree in marine biology and ecotoxicology at McGill University. I was full of hope, and ready to put my experience and qualifications to use. My dream had always been marine turtle conservation, and I was exactly where I thought I needed to be. Unfortunately, plans don’t always work out as we hope, and I found myself adapting to life in Montreal outside of research and academia.
A newly relocated nest (left) and freshly hatched Green(?) sea turtles, from conservation work at Malena, Panama
Despite everything the city has to offer, more and more I found myself missing what had drawn me to biology: a passion for learning, for understanding and becoming a steward of our environment, and for collaborating and networking with an amazing diversity of people I have only met in academia. So, when I learned of a 1-year program in bioinformatics offered at UQAM, I jumped at the chance without even knowing what bioinformatics was, nor the first thing about computer programming.
A second chance
Two years later, and I can’t believe how much has changed. A 1-year program became 3, after deciding to pursue a second Master’s in bioinformatics, a decision I never thought I would make, but that has honestly changed my life. I’ve settled back into academia almost as if I never left. I’ve learned a lot about programming, genetic research, microbiology and molecular ecology, and most importantly, how bioinformatics can lead me back to a career in conservation (or close enough).
The first big step in this journey was to attend my first major conference in over 10 years and present my first poster at the CSEE in Sherbrooke. My work focuses on methods in metagenomics, specifically the assembly of bacterial genomes de novo from metagenomic shotgun sequencing – using a suite of computer programs in a process analogous to “assembling jigsaw puzzles from a mixture of many puzzles without knowing how many puzzles are present and what they look like” My hopes for the conference, on top of presenting my work, were to meet other researchers and research groups working with metagenomics, and to get a better understanding of the role bioinformatics plays in current ecological research.
Unexpected reunions
My week at CSEE started off with a field trip to the nearby Île du marais, a 3.6-km walk around the swampy end of Lake Magog. We got to see plenty of turtles, frogs, birds, mushrooms, and of course plants. It was also a great opportunity to connect with new people from across Canada. What followed was three days of wonderful talks on a wide variety of topics, some familiar, some new. I got to meet new collaborators, new friends, and quite a few of my lab’s colleagues whom I knew of through name alone.
Some flora and fauna from Île du marais
While I expected I may run into profs I recognized from my first degree, I was both surprised and extremely happy to reunite (if only briefly) with friends I had made and lost contact with in my absence from research. And though they have become professors with their own labs and research groups while I am back again as a student, reconnecting with them and feeling their happiness for me, and their support that I was able to come back to pursue my dreams again after 10 years, made this experience unforgettable.
About the author:
David is a Master’s student in informatics (bioinformatics) at l’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), under the supervision of Professors Vladimir Makarenkov and Steven Kembel. His work focuses on methods for microbiome analysis, in particular the recovery of Metagenome-Assembled Genomes (MAGs), and applying this work to explore microbial diversity in the phyllosphere. He hopes to apply this skillset to study marine ecology, the potential effects of climate change to marine microbiomes, and the adaptations of organisms to these changes in order to improve conservation efforts.
Love the puzzles analogy! Really describes the madness of the task haha.