Download statement of purpose sop and more Study Guides, Projects, Research Philosophy in PDF only on Docsity! Statement of Purpose When I was five or six years old, if anyone asked me what my father’s name was I used to answer “Dr. Lutfor Rahman”. More often than not the next question was, “What kind of doctor is he?” Then I had to explain that he was not a medical doctor but a Ph.D., leaving the enquirer less than impressed. I learnt quickly that it was easier to leave out the “Dr.” part and decided that whatever this Ph.D. thing was I was never going to get one. But now having encountered research work from many disciplines and after doing some research myself, I realize the value of research in advancing knowledge and how challenging research can be and have set my mind on pursuing a career as a researcher - with a Ph.D. - in the area of bioinformatics and computational biology. My interest in biology predates my interest in computer science. I remember how fascinated I was by two amazing books by Sir David Attenborough, “Life on Earth” and “The Living Planet”, so much so that when I was in junior high school I wanted to study genetics. But as I grew up my interest in computers overtook my interest in genetics and I chose to major in computer science and engineering. Admittedly the fact that most of the top students sought admission to the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) influenced my choice. I worked hard as a CSE student making sincere efforts in all my theory courses and different hardware and software projects and managed to secure second place in my class. But even as a third year student I had not yet made up my mind to become a researcher, thinking it would be better to become an explorer traveling the world, seeing its flora and fauna. But all that changed while I was working on my undergraduate thesis. My advisor Dr. Masud Hasan proposed “algorithms in bioinformatics” as a research topic. I did some background study on this subject and was amazed to find out how techniques in computer science were being used to solve problems in biology. As a subject that combined two of my inter- ests, I immediately got hooked. Initially, we did a survey on different computational problems in bioinformatics to explore how various techniques of computer science are being applied to tackle diverse biological problems. Eventually, we focused on genome rearrangement problems. We con- sidered the two most common rearrangement operations, namely reversal and transposition, and used the concept of breakpoint graphs to develop an algorithm which had a better approximation ratio than any algorithm known previously, or at least we thought so. But after writing it up as a research paper one day, we discovered - in the midst of discussion that the algorithm had a severe limitation. I was distraught but my supervisor, Dr. Masud Hasan, was more hopeful which encouraged me. That evening I was returning home by bus. There were horrible traffic jams in all the roads because of some ongoing political processions. I started thinking about our algorithm and after some time came up with a modification that could solve the problem. I could not wait to get home and verify the idea. Finally, I got home and eureka, it worked! I still remember the joy I felt and treasure it as one of the happiest moments of my life. I’ll never think of traffic jams in quite the same way again. We presented the algorithm at “Workshop on Algorithms and Computation 2007 (WALCOM ’07)”. A revised version has appeared in the “Journal of Discrete Algorithms”. Later, in a subsequent work we focused on a graph-theoretic approach to constructing phylogenetic tree from similarity data and developed an algorithm for constructing an approximate second root phylogenetic tree which was an improvement over the best known previous result. The algorithm has been published in “IAENG International Conference on Bioinformatics 2008 (ICB ’08)” held in Hong Kong. 1
