I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science department at the University of Maryland, College Park,
while at the same time, I am a trainee at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where I belong to Genomics group
and am closely working with Dr. Steven Salzberg, (a professor of Medicine and Biostatistics at Hopkins).
I'm currently working on TopHat, a spliced aligner for RNA-seq reads,
and Cufflinks that assembles and quantifies transcripts (mRNA).
Recently, I extended both programs to handle fusion transcripts (TopHat-Fusion and Cufflinks-Fusion), where fusion transcripts result from the breakage and re-joining of two different chromosomes, or from rearrangements within a chromosome.
Prior to entering the current Ph.D. program (Fall 2008), I spent five years working at a software development company for computer games in South Korea where I used to manage several project teams and also worked as a main developer. While working at the company, I had learned many valuable programming skills including 3D graphics rendering engines such as Ogre, Gamebryo, Torque and networking programing based on ACE for both server and client sides. In addition, I spent considerable time with my colleagues developing some general framework for computer games, all of which turned out to be very helpful for doing my own research. Some screen shots of the games in which I was involved can be found at pic1, pic2, and pic3.
I do love playing sports such that I work out almost every day since a long time ago (>15 years), which helps me stay in shape and gives me strong stamina. The sports I have enjoyed include Taekwondo (and Hapkido, korean martial arts), Judo, Swimming, Inline Skating. Now I'm training for marathon, which I have done eight times including the Boston marathon 2012. Besides doing research and working out, I enjoy studying something I am not familar with. It turned out that the Cell research I've been doing requires many disciplines other than computer science (my major), such as biology, medicine, chemistry, mathematics(statistics), and some others, which means I have enough materials to study in my life (see the list of books I've read). Life is all about learning!