George Bell: Bioinformatics and Research Computing (BaRC)

At the end of his PhD research in chicken embryo development, George Bell realized that it was time for a change. “I happened to have a quite repetitive project,” he says. “I kind of had enough of that. One of the advantages of bioinformatics is that if you have to do the same thing over and over, you just write a program to automatically do it lots and lots of times. You have very little time to get bored.” Over time, he became more interested in the computational techniques he was using than the lab work itself.

The move to working in bioinformatics full time made sense for the job market as well as his interests, Bell says. In the early 2000s, sequencing of the human genome was opening up opportunities to look at all genes at once, and making sense of the genome required lots of computational methods. By now, bioinformatics has become mainstream, and virtually every molecular biologist can take advantage of genomics and bioinformatics at some point during their research.

“There’s also a huge demand for people who can share their expertise across multiple labs,” Bell says. “Every professor doesn’t have to have their bioinformatics person that they might just need from time to time.”

As BaRC director at Whitehead Institute, Bell gets to collaborate with many different researchers. “Being a staff scientist in a core group is a fantastic position, because you get to do science all day every day, and you get to jump around to lots and lots of different projects,” he says.

BaRC works with researchers where they are, meaning that the team can train people in computational methods and also can run complete analyses if need be. The team also helps maintain and update software that is crucial for particular labs in the long term. The alternative would be laborious handoffs between each successive generation of students and postdocs.

“Someone could figure out any of their bioinformatics needs on their own,” Bell says. “However, we’ve probably already made every mistake they’re going to make, and we’ve already figured out how to solve most of them.”

Computational techniques keep becoming more important, Bell says. “People’s experiments are getting bigger, more complex, and more quantitative,” he says. “The combination of those three things mean that people need more complex computer programs and more statistics to answer a lot of the questions.” For those needs, BaRC is there to help, he says.

Bell says all the interesting computational challenges that researchers bring to BaRC are what make him excited to come into work every morning. Outside of work, Bell spends lots of time with his family and loves to explore Arlington's Spy Pond with his four children, whether swimming, paddle boarding, kayaking, or ice skating.