Alex Penson is a postdoctoral research scientist in the Rabadan Lab. He is searching for traces of disease-causing organisms in genetic data as well as studying the molecular basis of Myelodysplastic syndrome and Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He develops computational and statistical methods to efficiently analyze large amounts of genomic data, drawing on skills honed during his doctoral work in high energy physics searching for hypothetical sub-atomic particles called gravitons at the Large Hadron Collider. Between his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, Alex spent a year teaching English in Beijing and north-west Brazil.