Victor Luís Gama de Assis

Expected Graduation Date
2025

Major
Computer Engineering

Research Interests
Architecture, Compilers, and Parallel Computing Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Scientific Computing

Research Mentor
Mohammed El-Kebir

Research Description
Application of combinatorial optimization techniques to characterize biological patterns

Biography

Since my first year of undergraduate studies, my main career objective has been to be an entrepreneur. Also in this year I discovered computational biology by watching a lecture about a project that was studying Amazon’s biodiversity and creating a genome map. At the beginning, besides being interested in the field, I used to believe that computational biology was exclusively a pure research field, without the possibility to follow a more industry focused career. Because of this belief, I kept it as a side interested for some years, until the
beginning of 2023.  At the beginning of 2023 I started to study the biotech market. By doing that, I discovered lots of researchers that were creating startups with their work inside academia.  The idea of leveraging science to deliver real value to society, mainly because it involves improving the health of the population, really got me. So, to focus on this objective I left my
internship in the data science team of a fintech and started looking for research opportunities.  I received two great opportunities: a project backed by CNPQ (Brazil’s national committee for technological and scientific develpment) to develop an rithmetic Logic Unit within escherichia coli cells and to be a member of Computational Systems Biology Laboratory, a joint laboratory between the University of São Paulo and Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein.

I also changed my career plan: from working in data science & engineering in
software startups just after finishing my undergraduate studies to then create my own business, to following a academic path on computational biology and, by the end of a PhD, to start my own biotech company. I strongly believe that a summer research internship in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will be essential to help me achieve these goals for two main reasons: 1) curriculum and portfolio to apply to great PhD programs and 2) getting to know how research works on a world class institution. I also strongly consider applyinng to PhD programs in Illinnois, so the opportunity to prior experience its academical
environment and how is life in Chicago and Urbana is amazing. Finally, I would love to extend the work developed during the two months of the program and continue contributing in research after it.