Thinking is good.

I have many interests, and need to focus. Off the top of my head, my main interests are (now): molecular bioinformatics, scientific communications in the biological sciences, biological ontology and epistomology, social impacts and implications of biotechnology, and evolutionary bioinformatics. I do need to refine this, substantially, in order to make it a workable research agenda -- i.e., a dissertation. However, I believe very strongly that biotechnology represents a huge part of the future of everyone, and we need to do work now to ensure that it is of maximum benefit to everybody, not just the corporations currently at the top of the economic food chain.

I've also written a couple of papers not directly related to biology, biotechnology, or bioinformatics, but that focus on relevant and significant aspects of our intellectual property regime. One is a a Foucalt-Panopticon-ish take on DRM technologies, and the other is a historical study of the late 1930s Temporary National Economic Committee hearings on patents and monoploy.

I am currently the research assistant for the Scientific Communications Initiative at the Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences. We're working to improve the scientific communications process by creating training and standards for effective dissemination and curation of scientific data, something that is not done particularly well by most of the sciences at the moment.

Much of my research work for the past few years has been with the Luthey-Schulten group at the UIUC School of Chemical Sciences, where I help to implement bioinformatics discovery tools within VMD. We have one publication on this topic thus far:
John Eargle, Dan Wright, and Zaida Luthey-Schulten. (2006) Multiple alignment of protein sequences and structures for VMD. Bioinformatics 22:4 504-506.