About

Who am I?

I'm a scientist. More specifically, I'm currently a Research Fellow at the Centre for Cancer Research and Cell Biology, Queen's University Belfast. I have always had a passion for science. I remember wondering as a kid why humans didn't photosynthesise — it seemed like such a useful reaction!

Since then, my time as a bona fide scientist has been quite a varied experience. I have always enjoyed wherever and whatever I've been working on, as long as discovery was the main goal. Things haven't always gone smoothly though, I would admit to having made some useful mistakes both in the lab and at the terminal. Speaking of terminals, computers were my main pastime growing up. I remember building my first as a young teen. I spent days investigating the best possible thermal paste for the heatsink! Since then — and the first time my cousin showed me MS-DOS — I've been tinkering about with just about everything I could get my hands on.

I hope this blog can allow others to learn from my experience as a molecular biologist and bioinformatics hobbyist. Eventually, I aspire to share full pipelines for second generation sequencing data analysis. In the mean-time, I'll post snippets as I work out kinks in the many ever-useful tools others have created.

In recent times, my interests have revolved around Myelodysplastic Syndromes & Acute Myeloid Leukaemia. These have proven fruitful both as models for disease and as terrible diseases in their own right.

My current projects include, among many other side-projects —

• Developing the CRISPR/Cas platform to introduce disease-relevant mutations in cells
• Employing deep-coverage RNA-Seq to probe rare splicing events in cells
• Investigating the effects of the K700E mutation in the SF3B1 gene

If you would like to know more about me or have questions about any of my posts, you can contact me @fabiolib.

“Those who believe in telekinetics raise my hand”
Kurt Vonnegut