About

My name is Michael McGurk. I'm a PhD candidate in Dan Barbash's lab at Cornell University, studying the evolution of repetitive DNA using population genomic data. I do this entirely through computational analyses. In addition to thinking about interesting and convoluted biology, I get to spend a lot of time thinking about the sorts of strategies and ways of thinking could reveal the biologically meaningful patterns in the data.

I'm regularly surprised by where solutions turn up, and it keeps the research exciting. A major purpose of this blog is to share those solutions. Often times when I'm struggling with a technical problem, it's not the literature that saves the day, but a helpful blog post. There are plenty of tricks and ideas that I've stumbled across in the course of my research that I think might be helpful to others, but invariably end up buried in supplement. I think this is a good forum to share and pay forward the helpfulness I've found in other's blogs.

Outside of research, I juggle, yoyo, solve origami crease patterns, enjoy reading and writing poetry, reading and thinking about ethics and philosophy, am trying to teach myself Japanese, and practice just enjoying the present moment, all with varying degrees of success. But that's why it's called practice.