We got exceedingly lucky recently. Just as Connor and Chris Small were getting ready to leave, a programmer named Chris Warth was moving on from Marty McIntosh’s group and came knocking on our door. After some initial work together, it became clear that Chris was going to be a great fit. Chris has had a long history in computing, including as part of the group of five programmers that developed the Java programming language at Sun while it was still called Oak. After moving around the tech industry for a while, he spent a stint as a farmer and then decided to take up biology.

Chris is a real pleasure to have in the group. He is, of course, an excellent programmer, but also both knowledgeable and very curious about biology. So far he has taken over the work that Connor was doing with the Overbaugh lab, and has also been working on likelihood curve fitting and ancestral sequence reconstruction.