3 pursue new path at BYU

PROVO — Ryan Christensen came to Brigham Young University with the same goal as hundreds of science majors: to excel in his classes and gain admission to a top-notch medical school.

But he hit a snag while completing some volunteer lab work related to the Human Genome Project.

"They recommend that you do some research as a pre-medical student, so I talked to my friends, " Christensen said.

One friend was really happy with professor David McClellan's bioinformatics lab.

"I thought it sounded really interesting and I'd just give it a try," Christensen said. "I . . . signed up for some volunteer research credit, and I just loved it."

His research involved collecting and analyzing genetic data using specialized software. Christensen was so enthralled with the project that he decided to pursue a new career path: bioinformatics.

Christensen is one of the first three students who will graduate today from BYU in bioinformatics — a major created last fall due largely to the efforts of Keith Crandall, associate professor of integrative biology.

The major is designed to help students develop skills in both computer science and the biological sciences, enabling them to not only gather data but use sophisticated, specialized computer programs to solve analytical problems.

BYU's summer commencement is today at the Marriott Center. The processional of graduates starts at 3:30.

"It's a field that has a great outlook," said Crandall. "It's a major that will put students into a job straight away, and it is also a major (course of study) that will set students up to go to the top graduate schools in the country."

Crandall said many of the nation's top universities are developing graduate programs in bioinformatics and are recruiting students who are either computer scientists or biologists. But they are finding that the students need better skills.

"Here we have an opportunity to present students to these excellent graduate schools who have an absolutely solid foundation across not only computer science and biology, but have the added skills of chemistry and statistics and mathematics," he said.

Graduates with bioinformatics skills are in high demand. Of the three BYU bioinformatics grads this August, two will go on to graduate study at field-leading Washington University in St. Louis, having turned down schools like Yale, and the third will go straight into the field, working for a biomedical firm.

"These people are in high demand because we're in a genomics era where we can collect data hand over fist, and yet all that does is pile up a whole bunch of data, and somebody needs to figure out what it all means, and that's what a bioinformaticist does," Crandall said.

Christensen said it was culling usable information out of batches of data that drew him to the field. "I like the idea of, instead of just collecting a lot of data and producing it, actually analyzing it," he said. "I just found it fascinating that all this data that was already in existence, all the information we could extract from it."

The money to start the major came via a $60,000 grant from the Pharmaceutical Research Manufacturers of America.

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E-mail: mdecker@desnews.com