Straus's Blog

While I may be one of the youngest posters, my age gives me an advantage in being a unique netizen in the HASTAC community. As a young child I spent hours with video games; as a pre-teen, I was a MySpace whiz before the sociologists could begin to understand it; as a teenager, Google was a common verb, and I (unlike my dad) knew the blogosphere was nowhere near the troposphere. In fact, during a recent seminar I discovered I was the only person in the room to have never owned a cassette tape (or player, for that matter).

Currently, I'm researching how effective some of the bioinformatics research tools are and how computational biology can be improved by more mathematical knowledge of software. While I may be a scientist at brain, I'm all about emotion at heart; hence, the blogs I write and follow are both fiction (conveying emotion) and non-fiction (discussing emotion). Indeed, when it comes to looking at the future of collaboration and interactions through an interface, I'm fascinated by the emotional effects; sometimes the internet amplifies feelings, yet often it's difficult to tell sarcasm from honesty.

Outside of the web, I'm a manager for the Duke Men's Basketball Team, traveling across the country and working primarily on the team video. I'm definitely a foodie, loving to eat as well as cook--my full name is Matt Molecular-Gastronomy Straus. I am also a king of puns, as I love punking all of my friends with clever (and not-so-clever) plays on words.