From the Inside: A Conversation with Dr. Garrett Cooper

Is being a sequencing specialist a niche category? Are there a lot of people interested in this field?

Yeah, I think...

Obviously, it's going to be a niche category.

You're not going to have millions of people doing sequencing.

I mean, there are a lot of people doing sequencing analysis.

I'm not going to say I'm like one in a million.

But it's a somewhat rare skill.

I think also the angle that I was trying to carve out for myself was being able to do both... sample preparation, QC, all that stuff up front, early assay development is kind of what it's called in industry, and the actual sequencing analysis.

So in my early career at UGA, I learned all the analysis parts, but I didn't know how to generate any of the data really.

And so coming to my PhD, I really wanted to build out my expertise and how to work with human cells, how to extract DNA, RNA, these things sound simple, but you have to learn how to do it, how to prepare libraries, how to do sequencing QC, or how to do library QC.

You have to see if the libraries are good, then you have to load it on the sequencer.

This whole process just takes a lot of time to build those skills, and I wanted to be kind of the end-to-end guy, the one who could do the whole process from start to finish and not just be kind of siloed in one or the other.

Because I do think... a lot of scientists either pick one or the other, AKA you're like a purely bioinformatician or you're purely a wet lab scientist.

And I kind of wanted to bridge those two gaps.

And also Andy's lab is

like the perfect

environment

for that type of training.

All right.