in the red-hot field of bio-
informatics, junior Andrea
Northeastern can do for a motivated
student.
"I liked Northeastern the best, especially
after meeting the faculty and dean, and
especially because of the opportunity to
do research here."
Robert Futrelle's Biologic Knowledge
Lab, where she focused on enabling
biologists to search large volumes of
data by asking questions in common
scientific terms.
creating analytical software as a co-op
student in Futrelle's lab. "I'm interested
in computational linguistics," she
explains. "I was able to dive in without
having a strong biology background
because we're looking at how biologists
package information."
language patterns found in scientific
research to uncover relationships that
can help make the search process more
intuitive. The volume of research in
grows exponentially every year, making
reliable search engines ever more crucial.
of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Computer Society (IEEE) Computational
Systems Bioinformatics Conference
(CSB 2003) at Stanford University in
August, could also be modified for other
scientific databases, though it probably
wouldn't be reliable for ordinary con-
sumer publications, where language
styles are much more varied.
her thoughts about her future career
I was pretty sure I wanted a PhD in
computational linguistics," she says.
"Now I think there's a lot of potential
in bioinformatics."
open virtually any door. In addition to
the IEEE poster--on which her name
got first billing over Futrelle's for the
first time--she has been an author
of papers presented at the International
Conference on Document Analysis and
Recognition 2003 and at the Workshop
of Web Document Analysis 2003.