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 find an area I'd be willing to devote a large portion of my life to. 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 to start with, 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. A few months later I was off to the South West and academic life.
The Present and Future
I am currently a PhD student at the Bristol Centre for Complexity Sciences working within the Department of Engineering Mathematics and School of Biological Sciences. While there I wrestle with all things complex attempting to make some sense of the way they work. I find it thoroughly baffling how something like you or me, estimated to consist of 10 trillion cells, works so reliably or at all for most of the time! I wonder if there are underlying principles that govern the architectures of these sorts of systems, rules to the way they evolve over time, and question if inspiration can be taken when attempting to create new complex systems of our own.
This has lead to an increased interests in the rules that govern biological processes (development, gene regulation, chemical kinetics), how synthetic biology can be used as a tool to help understand complex systems from the bottom up, and the phenomenon of self assembly. In addition, I also enjoy learning about natural evolution, graph theory, non-linear dynamics and tinkering with novel visualisation techniques.
Looking towards the future I'd like to continue to expand my knowledge in complex systems and specifically try to investigate if building blocks exist for dynamical complex networks. 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 :)
