Benjamín Hernández: April 2017

Molecular biology is complex.

Disentangling mechanisms underlying the orchestrated action of thousands of genes, in hundreds of thousands of cells, with terabytes of genomic information, is inherently a hard computational biology problem.

And when it comes to integrating this data into biological hypotheses, the best would be to have as much help as possible from leading experts in the field.

Even better, if this experience can be firsthand.

Luckily, as one of ZENCODE core assets to me, I had the opportunity to get such experience with a research stint at the Lenhard Group of Computational Regulatory Genomics in Imperial College London.

There, a talented – and collegial – research group, together with a personal guidance from Alex Nash and Boris Lenhard, helped me to learn key analytical aspects and thinking frameworks that were immediatly applied to my research questions.

Computational Regulatory Genomics Group

Half a month passed fast. I learnt scientific hard and soft skills. And in parallel, I was able to have some fun sightseeing with my hosts!