Alex Nord (Ahoy!)
Welcome to the personal page of Alex Nord (he/him/his)!
I’ve been a member of the Wheeler lab group almost as long as Travis has! After completing my undergraduate studies in philosophy at Reed College in 2014, I trimmed hedges and lifted boxes for a half year before deciding to pursue an equally fascinating (but more employable) primary field of study: computational biology! I joined the Wheeler lab group in spring 2015 as a Master’s student, and the legend goes that my presence still haunts it to this very day (although now as a PhD candidate).
My research focuses on developing methods to improve sequence alignment, mapping, and homology search tools by enabling them to recognize likely locations of splice sites in protein sequences. My Master’s project was the development of the multiple proteoform alignment tool Mirage, which aligns protein sequences from the same gene family by first mapping them to the genome and then converting those mappings into multiple sequence alignments. More tools coming soon, once I finish polishing Mirage 2.0!
When I’m not blasting terrible dubstep into my ears while coding, I like to surround myself with several other sorts of other noises, including my own electronic “music,” the gnarly 2000s-era metalcore riffage that emanates from my guitar, the sonorous dulcet tones of podcast hosts, and (of course) a variety of video game sound effects!