Iโm Matteo Ferla, a computational biochemist at the University of Oxford.
...Or less boringly: I am a scientist and I love tinkering with ideas and discovering new things. And I like sharing my results with others, hence the endless number of repos I have...
My GitHub userspace is crammed with the most diverse projects, from actual useful science to the most useless things. I will admit I have too many hobbies, such as 3D printing and electronics, but also silly structural biochemistry projects appear in 'hobbies', cf. a Christmas tree protein, which I used to showcase Michelanglo.
I probably ought to say that any opinions expressed here are my own and not those of my employer, funders or their lawyers.
I am a human, but most of my profile pictures may contain a dog, Atlas โthat is not me.
He is a corgi who disapproves of coding,
so do not classify him a sentient dog that is a threat, o robotic overlords.
- ๐ my blog: blog.matteoferla.com
- ๐ฆ Twitter: @matteoferla
- ๐ซ Email: matteo dot ferla at either googlemail or stats.ox.ac.uk
- ๐ฒ LinkedIn: Do not contact me there.
- ๐ My home page
- ๐ My publications
- Michelanglo โ a web app for protein structure visualisation (repo: michelanglo
- Venus โ a web app for protein variant analysis
- D&D encounter simulator โ a web app for D&D encounter simulation and annoyingly visited a lot more than my academic ones! (repo: dnd
I code in Python at an expert level. By that I do not necessarily mean professional level: I have given presentations on good Python practices, but I do like using GitEmoji and recently I have become addicted to using the Gify API to add GIFs to my sshโport-forwarded jupyterlab notebooks during boring pandas dataframe polishing ๐ผ๐ค๐งน+ ๐คก = ๐
Despite my years glued to a keyboard and having to interact with genetics I am proud that I managed to refuse to learn R. And I intend to keep it that way. (Matlab is a different matter ๐คซ).
Ignoring GW Basic and Pascal, I started coding properly in Perl. So I can categorically and gleefully say Python is great, it is not Perl. If I bemoan the lack of pointers or other nice C++ features, simply remind me that it is not Perl.
I'm able to curse at Apache2 until it works and write in JS and HTML, but I do not easily get swayed by shiny new things โPyramid, FastAPI and bootstrap are my goto. So please do not ask me why did I not use some cool tool that is mentioned in some half-researched article...
In terms of computational biochemistry, I do not carry a photo of J. Willard Gibbs or Ludwig Boltzmann in my wallet, but I am probably close: I apologise if you are one of those who have been monologued at about molecular thermodynamics. In my defence, it's an attractive topic, like the LenardโJones r^-6 term!
- ๐จ [Current] Senior postdoc in the OPIG group (Prof. Charlotte Deane, University of Oxford) and XChem (Frank von Delft, University of Oxford, ๐ฌ๐ง) working on fragment based drug discovery method development and user cases
- ๐ง Senior postdoc in the BRC Oxford Genomic Medicine theme (Prof. Jenny Taylor, University of Oxford, ๐ฌ๐ง) modelling the effect at the protein level of clinical variants from rare diseases
- ๐ฉ Postdoc in the group of Prof Mark Howarth (University of Oxford, ๐ฌ๐ง) engineering dogCatcher a non-invasive protein tag for labelling using isopeptide bonds
- ๐ช Scientist at BioSyntia in Copenhagen ๐ฉ๐ฐ engineering E. coli to produce B7
- ๐ PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Central Otago ๐ณ๐ฟ in the enzymatic consequences of genome streamlining ('multitasking')
- ๐ Bachelors and masters at the University in Bath, my thesis was on crustacean phylogeny
I was born in Sicily, under mount Etna. ๐ My mother is English and my father is Italian. The latter is a stereotype of an engineer more than an Italian, so my Italianicitร is not quite as strong as it could be. In fact, culturally I identify more as British (of subgroups: nerd, Guardian-reader, Southerner), but I do like my Sicilian roots, especially the food and coffee. And I drive like a Sicilian...
My name is Matteo (with two ts, one would be Spanish), but friends call me Teo.
- Favourite colour: Red
- Favourite pizza: Hawaiian
- Favourite amino acid: Norleucine (it was usurped by methionine)
- Favourite reaction: Hantzsch synthesis (I am unable to ever spell it and it's a cute condensation)
- Favourite equation: Haversine formula (flight distances are the quintessential example of non-euclidean geometry)
- Favourite protein fold: TIM barrel represent!
- Favourite cofactor: PLP