Scientist joins computers, biology for discovery
Posted June 4, 2007
Just call him the “Glue Guy.”
No, Chris Oehmen doesn’t have an Elmer’s fixation. He’s the glue that helps hold together research collaborations spanning disciplines from microbiology to chemistry to high-performance computing.
Oehmen’s earned his glue-guy status by articulating the needs of each scientific branch. He can approach a research problem from a computational standpoint and explain its requirements to a biologist, then turn to a computer programmer and explain why the biologist needs to see data output organized in a specific array.
Oehmen bridges both worlds with an ability to speak the languages of biology and computing. It’s a skill he gained during a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship.
Since joining Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in 2003, Oehmen has lent his talents to one of the grand challenges of 21st century biology: making sense of mountains of data relating to genes and the proteins they encode, then using that data to generate biologically relevant discoveries.
Oehmen led the Pacific Northwest lab team that earned a top-three place in the Supercomputing 2006 Analytics Challenge, a worldwide contest showcasing the best examples of using high-performance computing to solve real-world problems. The team performed its work at the Molecular Science Computing Facility at the Environmental Molecular Science Laboratory, a DOE national scientific user center.
For the project, Oehmen collaborated with Bobbie-Jo Webb-Robertson, a Pacific Northwest lab senior research scientist, microbiologists Lee Ann McCue and Joshua Adkins, and with programmers, data analysts, mathematicians, and graphics experts.
They analyzed biochemical pathways in the bacteria Salmonella, an organism that causes food poisoning. The researchers zeroed in on “pathogenicity islands” — DNA segments that produce many proteins responsible for making a microbe toxic, or “virulent.”
