A little of my research

So being a poor college student at Stanford, I was given federal work study funds; I just needed to find a job to work for them. I looked at the cdc website and found a job with the Walbot Research Lab. They do work with the genetics of dahlia flowers and zea mays (maize). Some of their research has revolutionized corn production and ways to make the perfect corn.

For them, I do lot website work and DNA blasting. The website work is pretty straightforward. I made this little app on their website to organize all their flowers in a sortable table that depends on a text file stored from the server. This is operable on all current day browsers.

The code was pretty straightforward. I read in all of the flowers using some AJAX and then from there, displaying them with "sort" buttons on top. Anybody can use this code, as long as they mention me in the comments above.

this is how I run the blast

I also do DNA blasting as a bioinformatics research assistant. This involves using a program from NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information). It's pretty cool work. I get in their DNA probes that they've gotten from analyzing zea mays and I run the probes against datasets from the NCBI website. This is all done on my personal Macbook pro.

I don't know biology, or don't really understand the fullness of the work I'm doing, but I know I'm helping out this lab. I'm happy that I get to work with them on these exciting projects :)