Background
Although my name is officially Thomas Edward Gorochowski I'm not one for formalities and prefer Tom or one of the many nicknames I have picked up over the years - Chofski, Big G or Tomski. I grew up in a small village called Merriott for my first year and then moved to Odcombe another small village until university beckoned. Being born and bred in the West Country I love the outdoors and the peace and quiet. There is nothing quite like lying in a field with no one else for miles around gazing up as the clouds float by. This upbringing has also given me a great outlook to life - money isn't everything, the world has so much to offer and all for free!
On completing my A-levels, I moved away to study at Warwick University for a masters degree in computer science. Warwick was a great university and I met many diverse and interesting people. This was also the time I began to become interested in research. I was especially excited seeing problems being tackled using ideas that had been pulled together from many different subject areas - mostly concerning natural computation, artificial neural networks and network theory.
At the end of my masters, I did consider continuing on to a PhD, but after some deliberation realised I needed to better understand my research interests. Instead, having never lived in a big city and wanting to try and pay off a few of the debts, I headed to London to work for Accenture. The next three years involved working all over the UK and in Europe and the United States as a technology consultant. I was specifically focused on the area of information management and business intelligence and had the opportunity to work with some great people.
Having moved up the ranks of Accenture I had started to take on more and more managerial tasks, but moved further away from any hands-on work with actual technology. Although I found this change interesting, I missed getting stuck into a problem and started to look at other options that would fulfil this need. Fortunately, during this time I had been reading about chaos and complexity, and had found a PhD programme at Bristol University in Complexity Science. This ignited my interest to head back to academia and after attending an open day my mind was made up. Four years later I finished my PhD and I haven't looked back since...
The Present and Future
I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow on the Marie Curie Initial Training Network for Integrated Cellular Homeostasis (NICHE) based at the DSM Biotechnology Center in Delft. My focus is on studying how bacteria engineered to act as cellular factories for producing important products such as insulin, respond to these production demands. Using modern high-throughput techniques to provide a multi-level and integrated picture of the cellular stresses (transcriptome, proteome, metabolome), I build models that help predict the impact of these demands and use them to develop new ways to help reduce this burden. This work has applications across biotechnology from improved production of important biologically-based materials and compounds, to providing foundational knowledge for the emerging field of synthetic biology.
In addition to this project, I also make an effort to pursue some of my other research interests. These include: applying the concept of dynamical and evolving networks to real-world data sets; studying how synthetic biology can be used within an architectural settings to create materials with useful physical or aesthetic characteristics; and using a computational perspective to tackle fundamental questions in complex systems theory from the emergence of creativity to possible natural models of information processing.
Looking towards the future I'd like to continue to expand my knowledge in complex systems, specifically using synthetic biology to better understand the evolution of such systems in nature, investigating possible building blocks for natural and synthetic biological systems, and engineering novel and useful living machines. In the longer term I'd love to travel the world while working, hopefully as a researcher, and have a list of places to see and things to do that hopefully I can start ticking off soon. Whatever happens I'll do everything I can to wake up with a smile on my face :)
