Dr. James Taylor is an Associate Professor of Biology and Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University where he supervises a lab that aims to increase access to compute and data intensive methods for the scientific research community, particularly in genomics. He is also one of the two PIs that direct the development of Galaxy, the most popular open source bioinformatics platform in the world.
James Taylor got involved with Galaxy as a graduate student while he attended Penn State. Back then, perhaps as long as 10 years ago his first contributions were the design and implementation of the user interface. Notably these elements stayed design-wise the same: accessible and usable to this very day. In the web world that is quite the feat, just look back to any decade old web site and see if you'd find it usable or attractive today.
Dr. Taylor actively participates in the development of Galaxy and currently focuses his attention to improving the visualization capabilities of the software platform He also contributes to a large lists of projects.
James Taylor of Galaxy
What hardware do you use?
An ever changing series of Macbook Airs and Pros, linux clusters, XSEDE, and AWS.
What is your text editor?
vim at the command line, Sublime Text when I want something fancier. I hate IDEs
What software do you use for your work?
Mostly we develop our own software, but we use bowtie a lot, macs,bedtools, and whatever else we might need. Use homebrew and linuxbrew to install most things.
What do you use to create plots and charts?
Mostly PyX, Tikz and PGF, sometimes R, rarely Illustrator for tweaking.
What do you consider the best language to do bioinformatics with?
I personally use Python and C. I like small languages that I can fit in my head. I won't say it is the best, there are lots of cool languages out there these days, but you can get a lot of bioinformatics done without a lot of background with Python.
What bioinformatics tools/software do not get enough recognition?
Probably HyPhy (Hypothesis testing using Phylogenies).
See all post in this series: https://www.biostars.org/tag/uses-this/
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