[Biojava-l] (no subject)

[Fitzsimmons, Zachary]

Hi,

I am currently a sophomore at Siena College and a Dual Major in Computer Science and Mathematics and I am writing you today to voice my interest in developing for BioJava this summer through Google’s Summer of Code program.  I did research at my own college last summer on the Netflix Prize Project with one of my computer science professors and I am very interested in diversifying my work this summer.  Currently I am taking an upper-level computer science course in bioinformatics and I have always thought of this as a possible field of study when I attend graduate school.  I have learned about different global alignment algorithms such as Needleman–Wunsch and Smith–Waterman in class to match proteins and DNA sequences and later we are going to study the HP folding problem in-depth.  I am well versed in the Java programming language, having taken all of the Java courses at my college, and confident in my abilities to contribute to the BioJava project.  I consider the All-Java Multiple Sequence Alignment project described in your wiki article [http://biojava.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code] something within my abilities as an experienced Java programmer with past research experience and an interest in the field of bioinformatics.  Updating the BioJava code to be newly compliant and eventually implementing a Clustal algorithm for multiple sequence alignment is well within my grasp especially on completion of my college’s bioinformatics course and studying BioJava’s documentation.  I would just like your feedback on my proposal for working on your project.  I hope to hear from you soon and to apply for the position through Google.

Sincerely,

Zack Fitzsimmons