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The open-plan office on the seventh floor
of the IK@N (Informatics and Knowledge Management) building in Cambridge,
US is a busy place. According to Dmitri Mikhailov: “People have
this positive energy here because we’re building a new site from
the bottom up. That’s what makes it exciting.” Dmitri joined the
Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, Inc. (NIBRI),1
the new US research headquarters, eight months ago. He is currently
a member of the advanced computing group and is also responsible
for the local high performance computing infrastructure. With a
PhD in biophysics, specializing in computational structural biology
and bioinformatics, he is ideally suited to this new environment
that is leading the industry in its approach to advancing drug discovery
by leveraging IT.
The work involved in building up the new
site is demanding: “One of the things I found since joining NIBRI
is that I have to wear multiple hats. My background is scientific
but there has also been a lot of coordination and project management,
so it was a steep learning curve for me. I work on a number of projects
at the same time. This month, one of the things I’m doing is getting
desktop PCs in the US linked up to the PC grid.” In a ground-breaking
project for the pharmaceutical industry, IK@N has already linked desktop
PCs together, initially in Basel, in order to harness their surplus
power for use in power-intensive computer simulation and modeling
for drug discovery.
1 NIBRI is a corporation that operates
in, and only in, Cambridge Mass. The Novartis Institutes for BioMedical
Research (NIBR) is a global research organization. NIBR consists
of NIBRI in Cambridge and the drug discovery activities (but only
those activities) of other Novartis Corporations in Basel, Horsham,
Vienna, Tokyo, and East Hanover.
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“One of the reasons I joined Novartis was to work more closely with
scientists. I have a personal interest in life sciences and the projects
here are very interdisciplinary. My experience is valued and my background
allows me to give good feedback to scientists on how we can approach
things.
“I see it as a very entrepreneurial place
backed by a large organization. On a daily level it feels like I’m
working in a small biotech where everyone knows everyone else and
what they’re working on, but on the other hand there is access to
vast amounts of information and resources.
“When I first arrived, I was really impressed
with how the company functioned globally from the IT perspective.
You can just pick up your laptop computer and take it with you to
another office and it looks and works the same way, even if the office
is on the other side of the world – just amazing. We have great technology
here.
“When I look out of the window, I see the
whole of Cambridge laid out in front of me. And on a good day I can
just make out the Harvard campus. That’s something else I appreciate
– our proximity to renowned universities like Harvard, MIT and Whitehead
Institute. We have the chance to go to scientific seminars organized
both by Novartis and external organizations, so it’s a good opportunity
to keep abreast of what’s happening in science.” |
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