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key and scribbled drawing

Here’s a key from when I was a pale skinny undergraduate student. I was given it by the professor in the department I joined, to allow me to come and go at will. He trusted me to not burn the building down, or break the centrifuges, or drink the lab alcohol, and that trust made me feel really important, like I had arrived somewhere. I am still skinny but not so pale.  

This is a scribble of ideas that got my thoughts going about how to design peptides that can tackle SARS-CoV-2. It was done for a grant deadline that was looming up very quickly. As soon as I got the grant written I chucked the scribble on my paper recycling pile. When Artist in Residence Lorna Donlon visited our lab (on zoom) and we got talking about art, and science, and visualisation, I remembered this and dug it out to show her how messy thoughts can be at the start of a scientific journey. It is a time when the mind is juggling different concepts and trying to create something by putting them together. At a later stage of science, we need much clearer pictures to try and communicate to others, but this scribble was purely to capture my own thoughts, and now it is barely legible to me. 

composition

This is the annotation of a tune I wrote for the Indonesian Gamelan orchestra. This is a whole series of gongs, xylophone like instruments, and other things, and I am in a group at the National Concert Hall where we play on the instruments donated by the Sultan of Yogyakarta in Java. The annotation follows a seven note scale, but the notes are not pitched like a western scale, and the rhythmic structures are in their own world, with the strong beat on the last note of every group. This tune is one we have played, which stole the sequence of notes from a sequence of DNA. It is based on the triplet repeats (DNA code) within a human collagen protein, which repeats the amino acid glycine every three amino acids, so if you know how the genetic code works, this means that the tune is in nine time, a bit like a traditional Irish tune called a slip jig.

mouse and power pack

The ubiquitous computer mouse and a computer power pack are essential items in the daily process of our bioinformatics lab. The power pack is a reminder to me that some of our computers are probably using far too much power and to think about turning them off more often. 

spikes and small things

included by Lorna Donlon

When Denis held up his SARS-CoV-2 related ‘scribble’ up to the screen during our first zoom meeting in 2021, I was fascinated by it. As we were still in the midst of a lockdown I asked him to put it in the post to me. I started thinking about how nature has evolved this mechanism of creating physical spike-like structures which organisms use as forms of protection, to extend outwards and sense the environment, and to facilitate physical binding with other structures. 

I also noticed that a lot of the ‘scribbled’ lines in Denis’s drawing resembled bits and pieces of very small ‘molecular’ fragments of our built environment that I had been collecting for some time. 

tangle and needle

included by Lorna Donlon

One of the objects that distinguishes Denis’s lab from any other is the large cardboard box / archive  housing a tangle of old computer cables with different fittings and connections. This object is very important in the lab! Tangles such as this one here are an inevitable by-product of my work as a tapestry weaver, and I use a needle everyday. The work that Denis’s team does is to find particular ‘needles’ of coherent patterns of interest in ‘haystack sized’ tangles of bioinformatic data. 

Researcher Profile

denis sheilds

Originally from south Dublin, Denis lives in Churchtown with his partner Sally. His children have flown the coop so one nice thing about lockdown was when they came back to stay for a longer stretch.

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denis sheilds

Originally from south Dublin, Denis lives in Churchtown with his partner Sally. His children have flown the coop so one nice thing about lockdown was when they came back to stay for a longer stretch.

Find Out More

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