Kimberly Casares

I originally started out as a biologist, working in a wet lab. My professor at the time told me he had some data sets he needed to work on and asked if I would be interested in carrying on these projects. He was the one that introduced me to bioinformatics. At first, I was a little hesitant because I was classically trained in biology and in wet lab, but a lot of it is self-taught. He taught me the beginning of it, but moving from that step forward, it was pretty much self-taught. I've just always been a researcher in academia. Originally, I was working with plants and then I was working with plant genomes and using bioinformatics to analyze those plant genomes. Then I got into a PhD program, a graduate program at the University of Georgia. When I was looking for labs to place into, I found a professor who works with infectious diseases and uses bioinformatics, so I thought that would be perfect for me because I wanted to pivot from plants to public health while still using bioinformatics skill sets.