Friday, November 20, 2015

URSP Student Brad English Wants to Use the Information and Digital Age to Enhance Human Health


I became interested in this project after witnessing what biological simulations and big data could do for human health and well-being through videos like these: 
http://www.falw.vu/~microb/mcf/fomthemovie/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWUqZmDBJLc

I’d like to steer the fruit of the information and digital age toward ends that will greatly enhance human health as soon as possible by being able to carry out large portions of - if not entire - clinical trials far faster than before “insilico” (an experiment carried out on the computer) and without harming anyone at the cost of the knowledge.

I see these forms of tools as enormous boons, if not requisite, to solving some of the deepest and most difficult questions behind many of the terrible, incurable diseases out there.

In the lab, I work on helping better represent the data that these simulations are producing through a variety of tools like the “VTK” (visualization toolkit) code library.

One little neat thing I discovered while working in the lab this week was to take any range of numbers and plot it in parallel across 0-100 (i.e. if you wanted 2435 to 2622 translated to 0-100 in tandem and to scale) you have to subtract from the smallest number and then divide by the biggest. That was just a little hack I had to come up with to get my code to run properly; little victories – you have to take them on a daily basis. Haha.
J