General

Intellectual

• Extremely strong inductive reasoning skills that enable robust hypothesis generation: the extraction of the relatively sparse salient elements from a large body of often internally inconsistent information and the formulation of a consistent model from them, while simultaneously identifying areas of conflict between the model and the unincorporated data, and any significant missing elements.
• Complementary deductive reasoning skills that allow the development of research or experimental methodologies to test or expand these theoretical models.
• An ability to perceive patterns in systems that can facilitate understanding through the use of analogies drawn from unassociated fields.

Communication

• Excellent written communication skills, with an ability to present complex material in a concise, precise, complete, consistent, clear, and orderly manner.
• An ability to conceive and produce complex diagrammatic representations of systems to aid in their description.
• Meticulous attention to details of spelling, grammar, and consistency of style.

Scientific

General

• Routine operation of materials handling/measuring systems: pipettes, balances, centrifuges, pH meters, spectrophotometers, fluorometers etc.
• Safe handling of toxic, mutagenic, corrosive, and biohazardous material.
• Good basic understanding of statistical methods: linear regression, hypothesis testing.

Cellular and molecular biology

• Familiarity with online tools and resources: Pubmed, OMIM, BLAST, Primer3, etc.
• Preparation of routine cell culture solutions and reagents for experimental procedures.
• Routine maintenance of human cells in serial passage culture.
• Storage of and retrieval from cryogenic storage of viable human cells.
• Phase contrast, fluorescence, and laser-scanning confocal microscopy.
• Flow cytometric determination of ploidy and cell cycle phasing.
• Flow cytometric determination of protein expression.
• Isolation, purification, and concentration of high quality DNA, RNA, and protein.
• Polymerase chain reaction design, optimisation, and execution.
• Agarose and acrylamide gel electrophoresis of nucleic acids.
• Acrylamide electrophoresis and Western blotting of proteins.
• Preparation of PCR products for sequencing.
• Analysis of DNA sequencing and microsatellite analysis results.
• Restriction and ligation enzyme procedures.
• Bacterial transfection of PCR products.

Computational

Applications

• Highly proficient user of Apple Macintosh systems and standard software.
• Extensive knowledge of Microsoft Office applications.
• Good working knowledge of Adobe Photoshop.
• Familiarity with a great many other applications and utilities.

Programming

• Formerly, an expert with PASCAL and Macro-11 assembler for RSX11.
• Fair competency with Visual Basic for Applications.
• Some skill with Java, Objective-C, Javascript, DHTML, XHTML, PHP, JSP, MySQL.

Miscellaneous

• Dual New Zealand/British citizenship.
• Full N. Z. car driver licence.
• Significant knowledge of: science and technology in general; 35 mm film SLR and DSLR photography; native N. Z. flora.
• Excellent cook.