A couple weeks ago I defended my PhD dissertation, in which I analyzed genomics data to study two transcription elongation factors and an unusual form of transcription called intragenic transcription. The first git commit I made on code related to the dissertation happened on May 16^th, 2017, meaning that the work going into my dissertation took just over two years! (Grad school still took six years since I restructured my PhD halfway through to focus on data analysis without experimental work.) If you are curious, bored, or a transcription enthusiast, you can look at the dissertation and the slides I used at my defense. The code I used to generate these documents is also available on my github page.

The Winston lab after my dissertation defense.

A cartoon of the transcription elongation complex, showing DNA (blue), histones (brown), RNA polymerase II (gray), nascent RNA (green), Spt6 (red), Spt4/5 (orange), and the PAF complex (purple).

Since I’ll be on the job market soon looking for jobs with interesting data to analyze, I updated the personal website that you’re on now with new content and a new theme based on Minimal Mistakes. My notes on statistics/machine learning now appear as PDFs on a dedicated notes/files page, and I have added a projects page for projects I’ve worked on.

-James