Dr Samantha Pendleton
Engineer of data, ontologies, and clusters.
Thrower of pots, controllers, and eggs.
Digital Art
My Digital Artwork This page is a collection of art I digitally developed during the pandemic/my PhD. They are ordered by date (first to most recent). Thank you for scrolling!
Colours
The Rainbow project A set of fun - little - projects developed with Python for the command line interface.
As of 2019 these projects are no longer supported! indigo Simple to-do list: indi-go-ing
indigo is a to-do list tracker (GitHub repo). During my PhD, I often had impromptu meetings which needed my laptop and I found myself unable to multi-task: reading results, listening to others, and trying to write down notes.
Max Perutz Science Writing Award Entry
Weaving webs for smarter science This piece was submitted for the 2019 Max Perutz Science Writing Award. A competition for MRC students to write about their science to the public. It is aimed for students to communicate about their PhD in a way that a wider audience, such as non-scientific individuals, can understand - to help us build our communication skills. How can we do great science if we can’t find useful information?
Acidoseq: a toolkit for the studying of Acidobacteria sequences
Acidoseq Acidoseq is a tool for studing metagenomic reads, grouping Acidobacteria classified and unclassified reads into subdivisons based on GC content. It is a Python package, designed for Nanopore sequences, available open-source on GitHub with a condensed paper.
This work was a part of my Masters degree (2018), which the dissertation is available to read.
The motivation behind development of this package was due to many of Acidobacteria’s recovered sequences were labelled as “unclassified”.
Masters Dissertation
Metagenomics of Acid Soil: a study of Nanopore long-reads and Acidobacteria tl;dr: check out a summarised version of the dissertation.
Developed a tool to classify unclassified Acidobacteria, acidoseq, which is available to read in more detail in a project page.
Introduction Since I enjoyed my Summer Bioinformatics research position (2017), for my Masters dissertation I hoped to work with Amanda Clare again.
Amanda spoke to the same research group, who had new sequences for me to look at.
Outsider Perspective of a PhD
Witnessing my partner writing their PhD tl;dr: a PhD is an emotional rollercoaster with side effects (sleep talking).
My partner, Sam, successfully passed his PhD Viva, taking ~4.5 hours. He monitored his heart rate and plotted it, seems quite a traumatic event.
This blog post is to acknowledge the stress of a PhD from a friend, partner, and outsider perspective. I hope this post isn’t misunderstood or reflects any selfishness: I am writing to acknowledge this stressful experience.
Lovelace Colloquim 2018
Attending the 2018 Lovelace Colloquim in Sheffield tl;dr: my first conference, very fun!
The BCS Lovelace Colloquium is an annual conference for women and non-binary individuals in computer science and related fields. I submitted an abstract based on the poster from the Bioinformatics research I had done the Summer previously.
This year’s conference (2018) was held in Sheffield, which I was both excited and nervous as I had only ever visited few places in the UK.
Summer of Bioinformatics
My first Bioinformatics experience tl;dr: see the research poster.
Introduction Preface: Bioinformatics covers a wide range of areas, e.g. developing complex algorithms to answering complex questions.
Aberystwyth University advertised a position for a Summer research position in Bioinformatics. I always had an interest in Biology, yet slightly worried as I didn’t have much scientific coding experience, but I was more than willing to learn.
“An analysis of current state of the art software on nanopore metagenomic data”.
Old Poem
Banging Playground WARNING: read at your own cringe. I made this poem when I was 11 years old (2007) for English class. I was notoriously terrible at poems. It’s foggy, we’re drowsy, with the sound of bangs; We’re crawling around the best we can.
Shouting, exploding, and pushing to the limit; It’s raining mud, the sun seems timid.
Sweaty, dizzy, and confused; The youths are rising and all bruised.
Undergraduate
Highlights of my Undergraduate degree Although this post was written in 2023, it is backdated to 2017. I started my Undergraduate degree at Aberystwyth University in 2014. Originally, I didn’t plan on leaving Liverpool, but I was - thankfully - persuaded by an IT teacher, who sparked my interest in computers.
I discovered that I learn best through working examples and assignments. When it came to exam season, I did struggle a little.