Women in Bioinformatics Day

Nurturing the Next Generation.

The Earlham Institute (EI) hosted 'Women in Bioinformatics Day', opening its doors to twelve female high school students to nurture their passion for computing and reveal career opportunities in the bioinformatics field to talented young students regardless of gender.

Keen to play its part in engaging female students in science, EI welcomed Year 9 pupils from the City Academy Norwich for its Women in Bioinformatics Day. Three female Bioinformaticians from EI: Sarah Bastkowski, Dharanya Sampath and Purnima Caim met the students to talk about their research and answer questions regarding their own personal career experiences.

The students also got a taste of the work carried out by bioinformaticians through a presentation about the software tool BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool). Researchers use BLAST to identify similarities in DNA or proteins. Next, the students were hands-on with a species classification activity, concluding the event with a tour of EI’s impressive Data Centre led by Paul Fretter, Science Computing Team Leader at NBI where they were able to see our computing capacity first-hand.