On Alumnus Fernando Pineda (Ph.D., 1977)

By: Karrie Sue Hawbaker, editor

When Fernando Pineda was in the third grade, he entered a competitive private school with a focus on science and technology. Today, with a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maryland to his name, he is helping to develop groundbreaking biotechnologies for biodefense. Okay, so there's a little more to it than that.

Born in Peru , Pineda spent his formative years in Chicago , where he attended The University of Chicago Laboratory School, a school that Pineda calls “competitive but with a supportive environment.” When he finished high school, he left Chicago for Boston to study physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Pineda graduated from MIT in 1977 with graduate school plans left unsettled. He spent a few years as a data analyst at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In this position, he was the “computer guy” for a small group working on the SAS-C satellite x-ray observatory. He found the work interesting and rewarding, so he decided to go for graduate school. The University of Maryland offered him a quality program and a teaching assistantship.

Pineda was impressed by the caliber of the students at Maryland . He says collaborating with fellow students was a significant part of his graduate education. Collaboration was good practice for his professional future. Pineda credits collaboration with his fellow students as essential for his survival in his first semester of graduate school, which was, quite possibly, the most rigorous experience of his life.

In his second year, he began working as a graduate assistant in the nuclear theory research group. First, under the direction of Dr. Jim Griffin and later under Dr. Manoj Banerjee. He used computer modeling and simulation to study the forces between interacting Bayons.

It was a Friday when Pineda turned in his final thesis, “Baryon-baryon interaction in a chiral-quark mean-field model.” He took that weekend off and then started work on Monday at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). He had accepted a position in a computing group within the space department working on neural networks. It was 1986 and, at that time, neural networks, a subspecialty of statistics used for pattern recognition, was the next big thing in artificial intelligence.

Within his first six months, Pineda produced some significant work. Catching the attention of some key people in the field, he quickly made a name for himself in the Neural Network community. So, when he was giving a talk at the California Institute of Technology about two years after he began working at APL, he was approached by the leader of the newly formed neural computation and nonlinear science group at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) there. He joined the new group's technical staff and stayed there for about two years.

Pineda says he enjoyed his JPL colleagues, the challenging work and, of course, the Pasadena weather. However, there was the matter of this girlfriend. He had met her when he was still in Maryland , just a few months before leaving for Pasadena . After two years of cross country flights and long distance phone calls, Pineda returned to Baltimore , bought a house and married his fiancée (They now have two children and two cats).

When he returned to the east coast, Pineda also returned to APL, where he spent the next 11 years. During this time, he worked on applying pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and signal processing. He collaborated with Johns Hopkins colleagues in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science on projects involving artificial neural networks and statistical pattern recognition. About six years ago he started applying his techniques to the interpretation of mass spectrometry data. DARPA was funding APL to develop an instrument to quickly detect bio-warfare agents in the atmosphere. Pineda and his team developed analysis techniques for the mass spectrometer, which takes an air sample and determines – within five minutes – if it contains a harmful substance like anthrax. Pineda began to study more biology and how computing, physical sciences and biosciences converge.

Then, the tragedies of September 11, 2001 occurred and this area of science became more important than ever. At the same time, the practice of applying computation and statistics to the field of biology began to emerge. Suddenly, biology began to undergo radical changes, including becoming more of a quantitative science like physics. With these changes and his experiences, Pineda was well-positioned to take a leadership role in this field.

Deciding, it was time to move on, Pineda applied to two places – The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the University of Virginia Bioinformatics Institute. He received attractive offers from both places. However, when his wife was offered a faculty position in The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine's Department of Comparative Medicine (sometimes referred to as veterinary science), Hopkins was the clear choice.

Now at the Bloomberg School , Pineda is an associate professor in the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology and director of the departmental Bioinformatics Core Facility there. He works with students and post-docs, using physics, biology and computing to develop novel technologies and valuable answers to public health problems.

Pineda says that he is enjoying the research, especially developing new tools, as well as the teaching. Even when he was at APL, he taught courses for the university's part-time program as well as professional development courses for his colleagues at APL. He says he finds that teaching is a lot of work, but that the interaction with the students is great.

Pineda advises our current students and recent grads that one of the best things to do is to associate with people who know more than you do. You'll never learn anything if you're always the smartest person in the room. Also, when you are applying for positions and you are asked for a personal statement, remember that this is essentially a proposal. So, treat it that way. Be sure to show the search committee what you bring to the table. And, he says, young scientists must remember that the Ph.D. is just the starting point. There are many paths to take and many, many new things to learn.

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Pineda is always on the lookout for bright students with a computing background. If you would like to reach him, please contact the editor. She will be happy to pass along the message.