Review 2023

5 min read reflection, new year resolution

By the end of every year, I write a review of the past year. It is a great time to reflect on the Losses and Wins and plan for the new year. I can not believe 2024 is right at the corner. My review of 2022 can be found at https://divingintogeneticsandgenomics.com/post/review-2022/.

Goals reached for 2023

This is in the same order of the goals of 2023 in my last year’s review.

  1. Although we had some rough time at Immunitas as the leadership team changes the strategy and downsize the company to focus on the clinical trial, we are now back with strong team spirit. The computational team is supporting multiple biomarker data from the clinical trial and it is gratifying to see the drug can potentially impact patients’ lives in our first hands.

  2. I wanted to foster a learning environment within the computational team and prepared some time slots for learning deep learning together. We could not do it because of the downsizing. However, I stuck with the plan and finished reading Deep Learning with R. Read my post My 4-steps to learn deep learning for genomics.

  3. I took a week off and went to visit DC with my parents in law and the whole family. It was the first travel for a long time, and I am glad I took some vacations. It has been 8 years since I went back to China last time, and I plan to go home in 2024.

  4. We have our Monkeybread spatial transcriptomics paper on Biorxiv! It was rejected by a journal, but who cares :) I am happy as long as it is on Biorxiv. This is one of the benefits of being in industry. Kudos to Matt Bernstein in the group for publishing it.

  5. I published in Nature! Not in a way that I thought :) Embracing the command line: my unexpected career in computational biology. I hope my story can inspire many others who want to learn computational biology without prior experience.

Other Wins

  1. I joined Pythia Bioscience as their scientific advisory board member. Pythia’s CDIAM Multi-Omics Software Platform empowers biotech/pharma companies to derive biological insights from multi-omics data.

  2. I started my chatomics youtube channel in April. I published 50 videos on learning bioinformatics. When I started in April, I committed to making at least one video every week. I usually do it after the kids sleep or when my wife takes care of them.

Sometimes, I felt so tired and fell asleep with them. When I woke up, it was 10 or 11 pm. I told myself, I had not made one for this week, let me make one now. Eight months later, my channel now has over 3700 subscribers and over 35,000 views.

  1. I wrote 37 blog posts in https://divingintogeneticsandgenomics.com/

  2. I gave 3 talks and was on 6 podcasts! This is something new and I really love the experience.

  1. I consistently posted 3 posts on Linkedin every day for the past 8 months or so. Education is always my passion, I love to share my experience and tips on bioinformatics. I use https://buffer.com/ to pre-schedule all my tweets and Linkedin posts between 9-11 am.

  2. I consumed hundreds of episodes of podcasts during my commute to work. It is usually a 45-60 min commute depending on traffic. Without traffic, it only takes me 35 mins. You may complain about your commute. For me, it is the best time to absorb new information and learn new stuff. I always spend several mins to write down the key takeaways when I get to the office.

  3. I’ve read 12 non-fiction books spanning from leadership, self-helping, biography to business.

Losses

  1. I am still over-weighted. I need to loss 10-15 ponds and take care of my health. My back hurts if I sit for too long in front of the computer.

  2. My wife takes care of the kids most of the time, I need to spend more time with them. Kids grow fast!

  3. I need to be more organized with my time to be more productive. I will establish my own system/framework for my work and life.

Goals for 2024

  • Lose 10 ponds.

  • Top priorities is to support the clinical trial to identify biomarkers for potential responders to our drug. Help with indication selection for the second and third program.

  • Go to one conference that is not local. (I am spoiled to attend many conferences in Boston last year)

  • Host another AI for drug discovery conference in 2024. I co-organized this one in 2023.

  • Finish this deep learning course https://course.fast.ai/

  • Take one more leadership training session.

  • Make at least one video a week; one blog post/tutorial every two weeks.

  • Post every day on Linkedin pre-scheduled with http://buffer.com

  • Write 500 words every day. (either my learning from podcasts on my commute or any reading)

  • Read at least 12 books again!

  • I took the holidays making this course. yes, I was working in the nights although I have been sick for the last 7 days :)

      - Master real-world bioinformatics in R: a crash course for absolute beginners.

    I plan to make this one in the 2024:

      - Wet biologists’ bioinformatics guide to Linux commands

Stay tuned when they are out!

I only need to make sure I show up every day for the work. Be consistent and persistent. Time will pay the dividends. I understand great things take great effort. Read my article at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/power-delayed-gratification-achieving-great-things-through-tang.

Thanks for reading, I hope I will grow with you in 2024!

bioinformatics

Related

Next
Previous
comments powered by Disqus