Real Resume
The Real Book was created as a playful jab at the "fake books" musicians traditionally used to play jazz gigs. Fake books only provided the bare minimum so musicians could "fake" their way through unfamiliar tunes - the Real Book aimed to be the actual, authoratative reference.
I grew up in the suburbs outside Chicago, where I spent an honestly unreasonable amount of time either on a computer, at a piano, or accidentally developing new stress responses through advanced procrastination techniques.
For most of my life, I thought I was going to end up somehwere in healthcare. Then somewhere along the way I also became obsessed with computers, biology, statistics, machine learning, and trying to understand why complicated things behave the way they do - and how to fix them if they break.
Which, in hindsight, probably explains what the hecky schmecky bioinformatics is.
I studied biochemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (shout out! I-L-L) where I gradually realized I was less interested in memorizing pathways and more interested in understanding how you could computationally model, analyze, and interpret biological systems at scale.
Around the same time, I became an EMT.
Emergency medicine ended up changing the way I think about almost everything - especially people, healthcare, communication, and how badly designed ideas, workflows, and protocols became obvious the moment real human beings are involved.
There's something uniquely humbling about watching a trauma activation unfold at 2 AM while simultaneously realizing half of modern healthcare infrastructure appears to have been designed by someone who has never spoken to a patient before.
Working in EMS and later in the emergency department taught me a lot:
- how people think under pressure
- how fragile everything really is
- how important communication becomes when things start going working
- and how "user-friendly" software in healthcare often means operational if everyone lowers their expectations enough
That perspective ended up becoming the bleeding heart towards my approach for technical projects too.
Most of the things I build now sit somewhere between:
- biology
- computation
- healthcare
- machine learning
- scientific infrastructure
- and "this sucks and there HAS to be a better way to do this"
I really enjoy building workflows and tools that make complicated biological data easier to interpret and easier to work with. I'm especially drawn toward projects involving transcriptomics, genomics, statistical genetics, and scientific software engineering.
Documentation and maintainability is really important to me. Like really important to me. Organization, modularity, and reproducibility I think whether it be in healthcare or in bioinformatics makes life so much easier. I enjoy good engineering as much as the next nerd, but I personally suffered at the hands of enough poorly documented research code to develop long-term psychological consequences.
Outside of work and school, music has remained a pretty constant part of my life. I play music from all generations but is largely improvisational. I started playing with a more classical context, almost quit, then fell in love with jazz. In a world where optimization and perfectionism are the double-edged swords moving the cutting edge of healthcare science forward, jazz is one of the creative outlets I have (aside from writing and well, this and other side projects). I play piano, occasionally arrange music, and have a recurring habit of waiting until dangerously close to a performance deadling before suddenly becoming extremely productive for reasons science cannot explain.
I'm also interested in science communication and education, which is a big part of why this website exists in the first place. I wanted a place that felt less like a polished corporate portfolio and more like an evolving record of things I'm building, learning, thinking about, and occassionally debugging at concerning hours of the night.
At the moment, I'm especially interested in:
- computational biology
- biological machine learning
- healthcare systems
- transcriptomics
- scientific tooling
- translational bioinformatics
- and the future intersection between AI and medicine (It's happening people! I'm rolling with the punches.)
Long term, I honestly just want to work on meaningful problems with like-minded people - ideally in ways that improve either scientific understanding, healthcare systems, or the experience of the humans forced to interact with both.
And maybe sleep a little more consistently than I currently do. Don't worry, I'm actively figuring that part out.
Sincerely,
Emil Cacayan
P.S.
Huge shout out to my biggest inspiration, Jessica Hart!