User:Mark David Schroeder

The account of this former contributor was not re-activated after the server upgrade of March 2022.

I was born in Mt. Kisco NY on September 18^th (coincidentally the 5th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix's death, one of my favorite musicians) to Ronald and Holley Schroeder, two wonderful people. I also have an older brother John who is wonderful, but could eat a little faster sometimes. I grew up in Chappaqua, NY and graduated from Horace Greeley High School in 1994, where I generally liked Math and Science (except biology) and loved reading science fiction.

I then went to Cornell University in Ithaca, NY and received a BS in Biological Engineering (ABEN) in 1998. I originally picked the major because it's a good way to get a cheap engineering degree as 3 of 4 years are in the Agriculture and Life Sciences school which has lower state funded tuition. I ironically realized along the way that I wasn't so keen on engineering, but found biology quite interesting.

After graduation I took a year to try to write a science fiction novel, but progress wasn't significant enough for me to consider this a practical way to make a living. I also found I missed the way studying science inspired me by adding both clarity and complexity to my world view. One area that seemed particularly interesting to me towards the end of college was computational biology and bioinformatics and I started thinking about getting a PhD in it.

On a road trip back from Montana in a 1986 Honda Accord I bought off my 96 year old grandmother (which had only 18,000 miles on it in 1999!), I stopped off at Washington University in St. Louis and spoke to David States about applying to their Bioinformatics program. He thought I'd have a much better chance being accepted if I actually had some experience in the field and recommended I try getting a job with Terry Gaasterland who was starting a lab in NYC.

I contacted Terry and amazingly enough she interviewed and hired me as a research programmer. After working in her lab at Rockefeller University for about 2 years, I became a Rockefeller PhD student in 2001. While doing computational work in Terry's lab I decided that the complexity and lack of understanding of biology required an empirical approach and ended up in the laboratory of Ulrike Gaul. My thesis is on understanding the /Drosophila melanogaster/ segmentation transcriptional network which sets up the anterior posterior axis of the fly (ie it patterns the embryo so everything is in the right place along the head to "tail" axis).

publications: Sinha S, Schroeder MD, Unnerstall U, Gaul U, Siggia ED. Cross-species comparison significantly improves genome-wide prediction of cis-regulatory modules in Drosophila. BMC Bioinformatics. 2004 Sep 9;5:129.

Schroeder MD, Pearce M, Fak J, Fan H, Unnerstall U, Emberly E, Rajewsky N, Siggia ED, Gaul U. Transcriptional control in the segmentation gene network of Drosophila. PLoS Biol. 2004 Sep;2(9):E271. Epub 2004 Aug 31.

Yang E, van Nimwegen E, Zavolan M, Rajewsky N, Schroeder M, Magnasco M, Darnell JE Jr. Decay rates of human mRNAs: correlation with functional characteristics and sequence attributes. Genome Res. 2003 Aug;13(8):1863-72.

Gopal S, Schroeder M, Pieper U, Sczyrba A, Aytekin-Kurban G, Bekiranov S, Fajardo JE, Eswar N, Sanchez R, Sali A, Gaasterland T. Homology-based annotation yields 1,042 new candidate genes in the Drosophila melanogaster genome. Nat Genet. 2001 Mar;27(3):337-40.

---

Tasks: start a new article • add basic, wanted or requested articles • add definitions • add metadata • edit new pages

Welcome to the Citizendium! We hope you will contribute boldly and well. Here are pointers for a quick start, and see Getting Started for other helpful "startup" links, our help system and CZ:Home for the top menu of community pages. You can test out editing in the sandbox if you'd like. If you need help to get going, the forum is one option. That's also where we discuss policy and proposals. You can ask any user or the editors for help, too. Just put a note on their "talk" page. Again, welcome and have fun!

-- Sarah Tuttle 20:28, 26 March 2007 (CDT)