And So I Declared.

Last week, I formally submitted my declaration for computational biology. I've been flip-flopping since the start of freshman year, and I'm still not convinced that I've made the right choice, but I have made one, for whatever it is worth.

Applying to and arriving at Brown, I was confident that I would leave with a degree in neuroscience. The brain was the most fascinating object I had ever considered; as V.S. Ramachandran once said, “It can contemplate the meaning of infinity, and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity.” It truly is a remarkably plastic, self-regulating, parallel-processing biological computational machine, and I wanted to find out how it works. I still do, of course, but I have since gained a profound appreciation for computation itself, as well as the systems and algorithms humanity has developed to assist in solving more and more complex problems.

Yet I am, now and forever, a biologist at heart, and the problems I am most excited about solving are biological ones. How are gene expression and translation regulated? Why do proteins fold the way they do? What are the protein networks and pathways in any given cell? How do they interact to perform a distinct function (or malfunction, say cancer, when an error is introduced)? Returning to neuroscience, how does the complex circuitry of the brain generate its fantastic abilities? The answers to these questions lie in the realm of computational biology.