Will is a rising senior at Liberty High School in Renton, WA, where he is actively involved in the school community as a varsity swim team captain and editor-in-chief of the school newspaper.

He has always been fascinated with numbers and took an interest in science when he saw how quantitative skills could be applied to solve problems and benefit the public. Fascinated with scientific research, he applied to ISB’s high school internship in hopes of going beyond the simple labs done in high school and experience how science is done at a professional research lab such as ISB.

His favorite part about ISB is how curious everyone is. In their pursuit to develop a systems-level understanding of the human body and model organisms, ISB scientists constantly expand their knowledge as they read the latest scientific literature and formulate new questions as they analyze the results of experiments. He also appreciates the dynamic, collaborative atmosphere of ISB. Scientists are always more than happy to discuss their work or answer your questions.

This summer, Will synthesized his knowledge of computer science, biology, and statistics to investigate the effects of ribosomal heterogeneity on translational regulation. You can see some of his work on finding outlier genes and creating coverage plots on Github.

If you are a potential intern and have any questions about ISB, feel free to send them to williamrobertwick@gmail.com. You can also find him on LinkedIn.