Showing posts with tag: #cad

Iris Young (he/they/she) (PhD)

1 year ago

I guess instance migration is a good time for an #Introduction post. Hello lovely people, I'm here both as a scientific researcher and as a human being, and you can expect a range of genres of posts and interactions from me.

On the work side, I'm a computational scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the field of biological X-ray crystallography, specifically at free electron lasers. It's a glorious interdisciplinary mess, and the description I give to non-scientists is that i use my degree in chemistry to write software to do math that models the physics of experiments that we're running to learn about biology.

For fellow structural biologists: I work on crystallography data reduction software for the steps between photons hitting the detector and a merged set of structure factors. I also support XFEL experiments, both on site and remotely, and assist in post-experiment data processing as needed. My PhD focused on using simultaneous XFEL crystallography and XES spectroscopy to probe the water splitting reaction in oxygenic photosynthesis. I did a postdoc in computational methods development for cryoEM, and I'm now back to XFEL crystallography but still in methods development.

For fellow software developers: all of our work is open source and mostly under the cctbx project/repo. It's mostly python with a bunch of C++ under the hood (including some low-level stuff redundant with scipy and numpy because those weren't around yet!), plus a user-facing wxPython GUI. More recently we've done a ton of work with GPU acceleration (using Kokkos, for NVIDIA, Intel and AMD architectures) and scaling up at three different national labs' supercomputing centers in anticipation of next-gen experimental capabilities. I derive too much joy from writing bash-sed-awk monstrosities on the occasions we need them to fix an urgent problem during an experiment, and I guess I'm most proud of the fact that I somewhat understand git.

As far as hobbies, the longest-standing one is probably #coffee, followed closely by #language (s) / #languageLearning and a love of #patterns and #symmetry in various contexts. I have too many different ways of making coffee (they have overrun my coffee cupboard), but my favorite remains the classic latte, and by now I can make a better latte than I can buy. I'm trying to refresh my #Japanese and learn #Dutch and #German simultaneously/comparatively, which of course is terrible for speed of learning, but fascinating. So far I've found #ASL the most challenging but also deeply satisfying -- I only have one semester under my belt but hope to take a lot more. I studied and continue to study all the #math and #science I possibly can. Right now I seem to be pretty engrossed in #electronics, #CAD, #3DPrinting, and just generally #DIY-ing/fixing/repairing things. Other active interests include #sewing, #reading, #cooking, #bike commuting, and #publicTransit. My journeys in #aikido and #pottery are on hold but I definitely want to pick them back up when I'm not already overcommitted. I'm casually interested in #neurophilosophy, #neuropsychology, #neurodivergence and #neuroscience. I've taken one course in neurophilosophy and can read literature in the rest, with effort.

On a personal note, I'm trans and nonbinary and very open about it -- I transitioned back when I had to explain what that meant. I've retired from some forms of community engagement and support but I'm very happy to answer any questions I can about the US legal and medical landscapes, available resources, policy and terminology best practices, or whatever you know you shouldn't ask [person in your life].

Finally, I spend a lot of time with my cat Rory (pictured), who is perfect and the most affectionate creature I have ever met. I promise to share photos of him from time to time.