Britt Blithering

About Me

A Vacuous and Name-Dropping Biography

Permanent

Categories: General

I am a programmer by trade, a scientist by training, and a professional amateur by inclination. I grew up in Brooklyn and Queens, moved to Boston for my undergraduate degree in chemistry (Tufts) and three years after, moved to California for graduate school (Stanford) in the Department of Structural Biology. My advisers were Roger Kornberg for whom I did honest benchtop biochemistry, and Michael Levitt with whom I studied computational chemistry. The original intent was for my computational work to complement my lab work and vice versa but whereas I was, at best, a competent lab worker, I was a very good programmer. I finished my dissertation working solely in computational chemistry/biology with Michael.

After graduate school I despaired of becoming an academic scientist—it isn't easy and it requires a high tolerance for delayed gratification. So I found work at Molecular Applications Group, since defunct, Interwoven and most recently at Alfresco.

I like algorithms, filesystems and filesystem-like systems, scheme, programming languages, numerical simulation, groovy—pretty much anything related to computing that Microsoft hasn't managed to sully. I like tastelessness for its own sake. I have an unhealthy obsession with Buffy The Vampire Slayer. I'm a photographer, (bad) guitar player, unrepentant smoker, and worse things to boot.

Posted: April 12, 2008