A Publication for West Coast Alumni and Friends
Vol. 1, No. 1 / January 2001 - California Connection: Making a Difference Where Technology Meets Real Life

A Silicon Valley Pioneer

"These skills will help in the software development aspect in my field of computational biology."

Frederick Tan traveled west earlier this year as a new kind of pioneer.

The double major in biotechnology and computer science was one of nine WPI students who pursued the first 10-week Major Qualifying Projects at the Silicon Valley Project Center.

Tan and his two project partners produced a software tool for Kana Communications in Redwood City, Calif. The tool enables the company's client services department to import data from a customer's legacy system into Kana's customer service management program. "I learned a lot about databases, batch processing and proper software development," he says. "These skills will help in the software development aspect in my field of computational biology, which is also known as bioinfomatics."

When Tan was growing up, his father, a physician, gave him math problems to solve and Fred asked him how things worked in the natural world. Back and forth it went.

Knowing of Tan's abilities in math and science, his guidance counselor at Saint Joseph High School in Trumbull, Conn., handed him a list of colleges, noting that at WPI, "they do things differently."

Tan skipped the usual college background research and instead just attended three WPI open houses. "Hey, pretty good!" he decided, and enrolled.

And got busy. He served as co-photo editor of Newspeak (now Tech News), worked on the yearbook, conducted campus tours for the Admissions Office, joined Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity, was admitted to Alpha Phi Omega, the co-ed service fraternity, and was coxswain of the crew team. He now fences saber and is a member of the Student Alumni Society.

Tan spent last summer on Long Island in Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's undergraduate research program. He wanted to learn more about how, through computational biology, he can work toward solutions to problems in molecular biology.

"The Human Genome Project," he says, "is turning out massive amounts of protein and sequence data. What are their functions? In finding the answers, new drugs and new vaccines, for example, can be developed."

Universities and biotech and pharmaceutical companies are focusing on such applications. At WPI, computational biology, or bioinfomatics, is an important research focus area.

Fred Tan continues to ready himself. He has applied for five graduate research fellowships and has narrowed his search to five universities in his plan to earn a Ph.D. An academic career appeals to him.

While he eyes a life of classroom teaching, research and scholarship, he points happily to his groundbreaking days at the Silicon Valley Project Center. "I liked the culture -- work hard, play hard."