Derek Jones
Computer Science and Engineering
- Profile
Profile
I am a first-generation college graduate and the first in my family to pursue graduate study. I grew up in a rural eastern Kentucky community in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. I attended the University of Kentucky where I pursued my Bachelor's in Computer Science with a dual major in Mathematical Economics then immediately afterward my Master's in Computer Science. I fell in love with calculus in high school and that motivated me to continue pursuing a mathematics-oriented focus in my undergraduate studies, even though I had no idea I would eventually end up working on modeling protein interactions with machine learning in my master's thesis. My identity as a biracial person perhaps predisposed me to engage with interdisciplinary research topics in bioinformatics as they afforded to me the opportunity to take something I was passionate about and come together with other equally passionate people to solve a problem neither party could as adequately address on their own. As part of my work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, I have had opportunities to continue this type of work to accelerate physics-based efficacy modeling and intelligent chemical space optimization algorithms as part of the ATOM (Accelerating Therapeutic Opportunities in Medicine) consortium.