Andrew Morin, Ph.D.
Policy Research Fellow
Published August 11, 2014
Just Above the Trenches
Since 2011, Andrew Morin has been a post-doctoral fellow at SBGrid working on “low-level science policy” related to research computing. In contrast to high-level policy, those issues discussed at the National Institutes of Health or in Congress, Morin focuses on issues much closer to the bench, such as how to publish source code, how to license it, and how to share computational results. The work is central to SBGrid’s mission to support and promote the development of scientific software applications used in structural biology and fills a much needed, yet somewhat amorphously defined, gap in modern science.
“Being interested in research computing policy, SBGrid is a wonderful match,” says Morin. “It’s a nexus for both the creators of software tools and the scientists who use them.”
Morin did pharmacology research as an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis and, for graduate school, chose to add computing to his skill set. At Vanderbilt, his research involved designing proteins computationally, then going into the lab to create and test them, with the intention — a goal that was not fulfilled until much later — of designing protein therapeutics.
So far at SBGrid, Morin has published several papers, such as one in Science about the importance of publishing source code so that it can be peer reviewed. “If you write a program and explain in plain language how it works, without revealing any source code, that’s a black box,” says Morin. “That’s not how science works.”
Looking forward, Morin is tackling several issues, including software patents, the use of cloud computing in science, and reproducibility of computational research. “In computing, reproducibility involves data sets, code, scripts, file formats, and so on,” says Morin. “How do you capture all that? Where do you put it?”
-- Elizabeth Dougherty
