About

Who I am

I am a graduate student in CEDAR at OHSU.

I am interested in using and developing computational tools that allow scientists to better understand their genomic data. Currently I do a lot of work on analyzing cell free RNA and using this for cancer prediction tasks.

You can find some of my work on Github

List of bioinformatics things I find really cool

Nanopore sequencing

Modelling sequences without using a single reference genome and reference free genomic methods

Cell free nucleic acids (who knew there was so much information floating around our bodies!)

Language models for proteins and nucleic acids (relevant to above, its amazing that they are able to work so well!)

Snakemake and bash scripting

Scientific questions I find interesting

How long did it take life to evolve/why is the cell seemingly the only unit of life that exists on earth and why is so much of our DNA shared?

How much qualitative information can we get from sequencing reads, what are some methods we can use besides simply creating counts tables? What are other vectors you can use for describing a sequencing sample?

Will it ever be possible to fully simulate a cell? Are cells a chaotic system that resists simulation ie will we be able to fully predict what changes in things such as protein variants can do to the cell over the long term. Or is this unknowable without simulating the cell at an infeasible (ie atomic) level?

What would cellular life on other planets look like? Could we ever detect it if we were on a planet with life?

Are their qualitative differences in the tumors we detect based off of the detection modality we use?

Are tumors found with imaging likely different from those found with sequencing? (is one modality better for finding tumors that matter?)

Contact Information

My email is rowan.l.callahan@gmail.com

for those who are interested in corresponding with encryption my key is on the mit PGP keyserver

E479A2F3B1846BA209471C4978FD03D091BA651B