When Soo Bin Kwon \u201916 came to Colgate, she planned to study biology, a subject that while growing up in South Korea and attending summer science programs in Germany, she found interesting and full
of meaningful problems to solve. At the same time, she didn\u2019t like the uncertainty of experiments. \u201cIt\u2019s a lot of patient work, pipetting in the lab and waiting for results, without any guarantee of success,\u201d she
says. During her first semester at Colgate, however, she took a computer science class with Professor Michael Hay and felt instantly at home. \u201cThe inputs and outputs were very clear \u2014 this is what you are given, and this is what you should be getting as the outcome,\u201d she says. \u201cThe problem-solving aspect felt like my thing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, Kwon is both coding and helping solve meaningful health problems as a senior bioinformatics scientist at San Diego\u2013based company Illumina. \u201cI would describe bioinformatics as the intersection between computer science, statistics, and biology,\u201d she says. Kwon looks at infectious diseases, coming up with algorithms to help biomedical organizations identify and track viruses and other pathogens. \u201cIt all started with COVID-19,\u201d Kwon explains. During the early days of the pandemic, some companies developed the now-familiar PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests to quickly identify individual infections. Illumina took a longer view, developing sophisticated genetic sequencing and high-throughput techniques to track variants of the disease as they spread through the population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe basic idea is to take any biological sample \u2014 it could be blood, saliva, skin cells, or even wastewater \u2014 and shred it up into small pieces,\u201d Kwon explains. \u201cThe technology we use then reads those small pieces of DNA and tries to stitch them together into sequences we can compare to existing known sequences.\u201d It\u2019s Kwon\u2019s job to help create the software that can analyze the data and give customers an accurate reading of what pathogens and genetic variants are present in their sample. \u201cYou can choose what kind of analysis you want, and then minutes or hours later our software will provide graphs and tables to help you make sense of what\u2019s in your sample.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kwon started using bioinformatics in her senior year at Colgate as a research assistant in the lab of associate biology and mathematics professor Ahmet Ay. There she used data analytics to help identify a genetic control switch in zebrafish embryos responsible for proper development \u2014 a finding that could have repercussions for understanding human birth defects. Along with Ay, she also collaborated with biology professor Krista Ingram to develop a mathematical model to analyze genes that control people\u2019s circadian clock and published their findings in Nature <\/em>(Scientific Reports<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n She cites the papers she co-authored as instrumental in getting her into a bioinformatics PhD program at UCLA, where she used computational biology to examine the differences in mouse and human genomes. When the pandemic hit in 2020, she and her adviser developed tools to examine differences in viruses affecting humans and other animal species, helping to better understand coronaviruses and leading to her current role in examining infectious diseases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among other applications, Illumina\u2019s technology is used to sequence genetic information for commercial providers such as Ancestry and 23andMe, optimize genetically modified crops, and study diseases ranging from cancer to rare genetic disorders. Kwon\u2019s work on infectious diseases helps aid biomedical researchers and public health officials in genomic surveillance by analyzing wastewater and other samples to track their trends. \u201cIt could be COVID or other diseases \u2014 even influenza, which continues to evolve and could one day become more pathogenic than it is today,\u201d she says. Though her work is still oriented toward basic research, she likes that she\u2019s able to apply it in real time \u2014 allowing her to tackle those meaningful problems just as she always wanted to do. \u201cIf there\u2019s monkeypox on the news, for example, we gather whatever information we can and collaborate with public health labs to give our customers what they need to study it,\u201d she says. \u201cMy work feels very connected to the rest of the world. I can contribute something.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Soo Bin Kwon \u201916 is helping solve health problems through bioinformatics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1272,"featured_media":14846,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[354,2261,251,350,1053,80,703,267],"coauthors":[153],"class_list":["post-14845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-discover","tag-alumni","tag-bioinformatics","tag-biology","tag-computer-science","tag-infectious-diseases","tag-mathematics","tag-pandemic","tag-research"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/palXSH-3Rr","amp_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2024\/04\/Colgate-Soo-Bin-Kwon-Final-Illustration-Colourway-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1272"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14845"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15045,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14845\/revisions\/15045"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14845"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=14845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}