Hi Özge,
Oh, it was a pure joy to have read your letter. I think its title was exactly how I am now feeling about my own education past: not questioning enough. I wish I questioned things more as opposed to studying for exams, lol. You asked me a few good questions there. So, I figured I should write you a little letter answering those.
“Do you get frustrated at the PDB files as I do?”
Yes, I do. I am also a bit upset that no crystallographer actually wrote a guide for computational biophysicists/biochemists on how to understand crystal structures. Evaluating the quality of a deposited structure, figuring out whether you are looking at an asymmetric unit with one biological assembly or with a portion of a biological assembly… If I were a grumpy crystallographer who thinks she knows everything, I would have recorded myself talking about these shits. Hell yeah, I would turn the whole thing into a podcast. Inviting my other grump crystallographer friends and making them dumbing down the shit so fewer and fewer people suffer. Is that too much to ask?
I really think it’s the true blessing to find an expert who can explain things with clarity. Unfortunately, I think that the current state of academia is not doing a good job on letting people prioritize science communication (or the joy of science…). I wish we all spend more time on this.
“I am curious to hear more about the thought process that you had when organizing the event. What would you keep the same, and what would you do differently for the next year’s Biophysics 101?”
Biophysics 101 is the only didactic session and is organized annually during annual meetings. The whole point is to have experts clearly explain a cool topic that they research on. Lots of people brought up having this year’s session on Artificial Intelligence (AI). I first thought finding speakers to teach us how AlphaFold works and where we are with protein folding would be a good idea. But, then, I quickly moved away from the idea of one specific subfield toward the idea of finding speakers who know statistics and statistical physics well and who can tell us what we can do with AI and what we cannot do with AI. To me, the most vital thing was to emphasize that AI is not gonna figure out every science problem that we have for us － we still need math, physics, chemistry and biology to make sense out of everything! I think both speakers conveyed that message clearly. As a result, I was a happy organizer 🙂 I also received a surprising amount of good feedback. (Being appreciated is not something I have felt professionally in the last three years, but since this year’s annual meeting this has been changing in the best possible direction)
Oh, I also talked to some faculty members at the conference who emphasized how much their students like to learn machine learning and AI and how much they are not ready to teach it (or more like, they are not sure how to incorporate AI into science curriculum). I imagine that linear algebra professors need to pave the way to introduce the concepts and faculty members in physics/chemistry/biology departments need to revise the entire curriculum to make sure that they cover these methods and their application areas well enough. It does sound like a nice challenging task. I like challenging tasks.
Did you take a linear algebra course during your undergrad years?
Let’s put everything aside. You just moved to a new country. You are starting a new job in a new place. It is so exciting! I can’t wait to hear about how it is going so far.
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