Clare Hall, University of Cambridge Summer Visiting Student Program Report

2015 Academic Year
Ryota Yamanaka: Doctoral Student, Department of Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo

Overview

In this programme, RCAST students can stay at Clare Hall during a summer to attend the two-week summer school of University of Cambridge as well as to work on research activities at an institute in Cambridge for up to 4 weeks. In my case, I stayed there for a month in August and visited a laboratory in EBI, European Bioinformatics Institute, for two weeks after finishing the summer school. My major is bioinformatics and databases, and EBI is a leading research institute in this field.

The market in the city centre of Cambridge

Accommodation (Robert Honeycomb Building)

Back garden (from the window of my room)

Summer School

Interdisciplinary Summer Programme is one of the summer programmes produced by University of Cambridge, and its lectures are taken in Sidgwick Site, just a 10 minute walk from Clare Hall. Though the lecturers are from the university, the participants consist of variety of people, such as undergraduate students, working-age adults, and retired people. Since the programme provides a plenary lecture, three optional subjects and an evening lecture each day, the schedule is more intensive than I expected. The most participants are from overseas, and they are often proactively studying during their summer holidays, so this is the best place to make foreign friends and to share our intellectual curiosity.

In the plenary lecture, different invited lecturers give one-hour talk every day and their topics are varied, such as international politics, archaeology, and linguistic. As for the optional subjects, we can choose 3 subjects from about 20 subjects, but the options may be limited if you focus on a specific field. In my case, I have selected only science related to subjects, so my choices were automatically fixed as follows.

1. Introducing psychology: mind, mental process and behaviour

2. History of science IV. The Scientific Revolution

3. History of science V. The invention of the modern world: mathematics, 1200-1700

While they were all stimulating, I would especially like to recommend everyone to take the History of science series. The lecturer describes stories of the scientific revolutions that happened while new technologies were spreading from a continent to another continent in the medieval period, and he also lively depicts the individual characters of philosophers and mathematicians and relationships between them in his talks. This class made me realise the fun of learning histories as well as motivated me to study classic mathematics once again.

Selwyn College locates just next to Sidgwick Site

Dining hall in Selwyn College

Visiting Laboratory

EBI is located in Hinxton, which is 15 km away from the city centre of Cambridge. Since this area, called The Genome Campus, has two major institutes, Sanger Institute for genomics and EBI for bioinformatics, many researchers who live in Cambridge take shuttle buses to get there every morning. Also, a large construction is ongoing to build a new genome analysis centre for the UK's 100,000 Genomes project.

The laboratory I visited has about 25 members and they are divided into several teams to work on their projects. While each team consists of bioinformatics researchers and system engineers, they respect each other's roles and collaborating very well. Also, the people are from many different countries, so this institute is truly multinational environment. I had some chances to talk with the people visiting there for a job interview, and I was surprised that there were so many talents who were applying for a post from different countries.

While I was there, I learned the bioinformatics tools developed by this laboratory as well as worked on my own project. Also, unexpectedly, I had a chance to participate in a telephone meeting with well-known researchers in Japan, and I made a demo program for their collaboration. This was a great opportunity for me to get to know the people in EBI and I hope to work with them in the future.

(Sep. 28th, 2015)

European Bioinformatics Institute

European Bioinformatics Institute

Construction for a new genome sequencing centre