Harriet Dashnow

After completing my Masters in Bioinformatics, I worked as a Bioinformatician at the Victorian Life SciencesComputation Initiative for a year before starting a PhD in the Bioinformatics group at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. My project is all about developing computational methods to help diagnose children with genetic disorders.

I am heavily involved in the bioinformatics community. I served as Vice President and then President of COMBINE and am currently the student representative on the Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society executive committee. I love teaching, especially programming and bioinformatics. I volunteer for Software and DataCarpentry. I recently co-authored the O’Reilly programming book Elegant SciPy.

I have always been looking for ways to combine my love of writing with my enthusiasm for science. Studying science communication helped me find the collision of these two worlds. It gave me the confidence to write on the less traditional side of the scientific literature, like Ten Simple Rules for a Ten Simple Rules Article and Elegant SciPy. The skills have also served me well every time I step into a classroom, be it an extension high-school lecture, or masters class, everyone deserves to be taught science in an engaging and thoughtful way.

Harriet on LinkedIn