Biography

Shorter Version

Luis Pedro Coelho is a PhD candidate in computational biology at Carnegie Mellon University. He is interested in computational biology that is both theoretically well-grounded and yields insights into real systems. Luis has a BS and MS in computer science from Instituto Superior Técnico. He is a Fulbright Scholar and has won multiple awards for academic or research excellence.

Outside academia, Luis has been involved in theatre (having produced the student group at IST and starred in several productions), as well as received a prize in a short story competition. He has taught computer usage in underprivileged neighbourhoods and designed Webpages for nonprofits. In Summer 2010, he will be found in Mozambique, volunteering with local organisations there (see beiraproject.org).

Luis can be found at http://luispedro.org

Longer Version

Luis was born, just over 29 years ago, in the coast city of Southampton. Shortly thereafter, the family moved to Lisbon, where Luis grew up. A series of fortunate coincidences brought him to the German School of Lisbon where he obtained his Abitur (final German high school diploma).

He went on to study computer science at the Technical University of Lisbon. Before finishing his degree, he spent one year in Vienna as an exchange student. Although Luis had initially planned to graduate and move on to an industry job, intellectual curiosity led him to enrol in graduate courses as electives. His interest spiked, upon graduation, he enrolled in the master's program (the Technical University of Lisbon offered the possibility of carrying the credits over, in effect merging the end of a bachelor with the start of the Masters program).

He wrote his dissertation about theoretical work on machine learning problems (how to handle noisy data for certain parameter estimation problems). At the same time, he came into contact with people working on bioinformatics and starting attending their research presentation.

This field attracted him. Here were large, complex, unsolved problems. Problems which were both theoretically challenging and of huge practical importance as they cross over to medicine. To prepare himself for this, he entered the CMU-U. Pittsburgh Ph.D. program in Computational Biology. He hopes to build up his skills and knowledge so as to be able to become a future researcher with an impact.

Reminded always of Mark Twain's advice to not let schooling interfere with one's education, Luis has taken care to participate in a mix of side projects and hobbies. He has participated in the university's theatre group with which he travelled to international festivals to play. He has received one a prize in a short story competition and also written open source software for the KDE project. He has taught computer usage in underprivileged neighbourhoods and designed webpages for nonprofits.

Photos

If you need photos of me (for press purposes &c), please check this page.