During her academic career, Amy Williams, transitioned from the traditional computer science toward computational biology and human genetics.
Now an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology During, Williams did her undergraduate years at the University of Utah where she obtained a B.S. in computer science and mathematics. She continued work in computer science during the early phase of her doctoral studies at MIT, focusing on programming languages and program analysis research. Despite being interested and skilled in the field of computer science, Williams said she couldn’t get excited about the work she was doing.
“I felt that my work wasn’t going to have a big impact in the way that I wished it would,” She said.
As luck would have it, Williams took a genetics course to fulfill one of her Ph.D. requirements. She said she instantly fell in love with the subject and soon got a second advisor in genetics to learn ways she could apply her skills in computer science to her newfound passion of human genetics.
Williams recalled that when she was entering the human genetics discipline during her doctoral studies, the data sets were much smaller than they are today.
“Since I’ve begun working in genetics, the amount of data has just skyrocketed” she mentioned.
As the data sets have continued to increase, Williams’ computer science expertise has been instrumental in informing the analytical portion of her work. Having experience in programming and designing highly efficient computational algorithms, Williams is able to approach big data sets and big problems from the perspective of both a geneticist and computer scientists. For example, she uses her computational background to develop algorithms for analyzing giant human genetic data sets.
Williams’ current work at Cornell is centered on understanding human history and relationships between people. Her work includes looking at how DNA is transmitted from parents to children, with a particular focus on recombination events. She is also interested in how algorithms can be used for genetic mapping in relation to identifying genetic associations to disease as revealed through the ancestry of a set of samples.
Williams said she hopes her work can improve the reporting of ancestry that companies have been doing by developing refined algorithms for detection of continental – and perhaps more fine scale – ancestry. Williams, whose work spans at least two disciplines, said the strengths of the Computer Science, Biological Statistics and Computational Biology, and Molecular Biology and Genetics departments at Cornell was a key to her coming to Ithaca. She is interested in working with her many colleagues at the University, as well as connecting with and advising students who may be interested in both genetics and computer science.
Valeria San Juan is a student writer in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
