INTERVIEW WITH DR.

LAWRENCE MAYS
By Noah Eldreth
October 28th, 2016
ITSC 1600 Computing Professionals

Dr. Lawrence Mays is the Professor and Chair of the Bio Informatics and Genomics Program at
UNC Charlotte. He personally engineered the program, building it up from scratch. He is proud
to have under his belt two degrees: a doctorate in neurology, and a masters degree in computer
science.

How long have you worked in your current position as a professor?

Late 70s. 45 46, almost 50 years.
What had gotten you interested in Bio Informatics?
Well there really wasnt any bio informatics prior to the late 1980s. What really caused bio
informatics to develop was the money being poured into the human genome projects. Prior to

that I was for 27 years at another university. I was at the University of Alabama at Birmingham,
and I was a neuro-scientist. In the process of doing that there was also a lot of development in
computers. While I was in graduate school, I had started using a big mainframe from IBM which
had a one megabyte disk that was half the size of this room, and then when I was in a post doc I
would use a PDP-8, which was really the first laboratory computer; sold for about $17,000.
Eventually I ended up getting a masters degree in computer science, and that was in the 70s.
What do you believe has been the greatest reward for you in your position?
As a scientist the thing that has been the most fun for me is, because I am the one who brought
the bio informatics program here to this university, discovering something and for a time being
the only person that knows something, something NO BODY else knows. It really is exciting!
Especially when you are dealing with massive amounts of data; its all kind of a giant fuzzball. If
you do the right experiment, if you do the right numbers, a lot of times it doesnt work but every
so often you just have an insight. AH! Thats the way it works. This is whats going on, and that
is the fun part.
Sense I have been here, I was a faculty member for 27 years, been the department chairmen for
7. Back at Birmingham in 2004, Jim Woodward hired me to start the bio informatics program, so
I think the fun thing for me here has been that we started off with no space; no building, no
faculty, no students, and no curriculum or courses. We in the past 12 years have hired 12 15
faculty. We now have a PhD program, with about 25 to 30 people, and now we have a masters
program and certificate programs. We now have a graduate concentration. We are the 2nd best
funded department on campus. The only department that beat us, and they beat us in the last
month was SIS, but they are throwing money at cyber security. We have been really successful! It
has been a lot of fun to see this thing grow over that past 12 years.

What were some the major frustrations you faced?

I think the major frustration is that the infrastructure in this university and the culture was not
set up to be a major research university. Prior to 1994, I dont think we had any doctoral degrees
here, and it you do not have PhD students you probably do not have a serious research program
because you cant hire faculty to a university that doesnt have PhD students, because it is the
PhD students who do most of the research. It was only the mid 90s that the decision was made to
turn UNC Charlotte into a research university. When I got here there were a dozen or slightly
more PhD programs, including one in computer science, but the culture really wasnt here. The
support systems, grants and contracts werent here. It really takes a lot. The graduate students
back then were moving around randomly, but a lot has happened over the last 10 years. We have
tightened things up. We have hired a lot of faculty than come from universities where there are
high expectations for scholarship, but it is not where it needs to be yet.
Are there any minor, recurring issues that you still face?
Yes. The state of North Carolina has cut out $60,000,000 per year out of University funding
sense 2008. It really had to due with the different philosophy. Some of it was necessary with the
recession, but most of it was simply philosophy. Basically, it was said that we need to cut back on
funding for public education, and where possible we need to shift the burden more to the
students and away from the tax payers. We have not been able hire people we need to hire. For a
long time, we were understaffed and it was all due to the decision to cut back on funding. Having
said that I will say that North Carolina is still way ahead of most other states. They always were.
North Carolina has always been a great funder of public education. The fact that we would cut
back a lot doesnt change that we are still doing better than other states.

Sense coming to UNC Charlotte and being tasked with establishing the bio informatics
program, what were some of your short term, mid-term, and long term goals?
Well the long-term goals were to hire the best faculty that we could, and I think that the slightly
shorter term goals were to develop a curriculum that made sense. It terms of the very short term
goals was larger the matter of crisis management, suppressing bad things that may pop up.
Is your job better or worse than a few years ago?
I would actually say slightly worse. A few years ago we were still in growth mod, still hiring
people. I got to design a building, and there were lots of things going on. So now were are kind
of in a maintenance mode so it is less fun. I now I am literally getting dozens of phone calls
about things that have gone wrong and trying to fix them, and before I was helping design a
building and trying to figure out what kind of carpet we wanted, and how many labs we
wanted.
What is an example of some of the software and tools used and what are they used for?
Well the most common software used is call Blast. It is a basic local alignment search tool. One
of the things that has really changed everything is the decline in the cost of DNA sequencing. In
2000 it would cost you $7,000 to $8,000 to sequence a mega-base of DNA. Today for a megabase, it would probably cost you 5 or 6 cents. It has been an insane decrease, and as a result of
that we have a petabyte of storage here, and that is nothing. The amount of data that has been
generated, mostly from DNA sequencing is almost incalculable. Blast is this highly evolved
aoristic algorithm that has a lot of flexibility. It will allow you to take an unknow or partially
unknown sequence of DNA and quickly compare it if you want to every DNA sequence that has
ever been found hundreds of trillions of sequences in the course of a few minutes.

What are some specific tasks people in a bio informatics perform?

They want to do things like develop a list of drug targets for a pharmaceutical company
develop a list of useful genes if youre in plant sciences, try to use DNA to diagnose someone. If
you go to work for a hospital system a lot of the work is directed towards cancer. All cancer is
caused by damage to the DNA. There is a lot of interest in that now. There are software
development companies that write code to design surgical machines, analyze DNA like Blast,
and more. We focus a lot on statistics as well. Bioinformatics covers a lot of things. The simplest
was to define bio informatics is we analyze DNA with computers, thats about 80% of it, but it is
not just DNA. It is all sorts of related types of information called omics. We talk about genomics,
We talk about proteomics. We talk about metabolomics. We talk about every kind of omics you
can imagine, and pathway analyses, trying to figure out how different things interact with each
other. We have basically the book of life sitting here in front of us. We just cant yet figure out
how to read it. We were talking earlier about how to use DNA to diagnose disease. Thats turned
out to be incredibly difficult. There are very few diseases where you can identify this mutation or
that mutation. Most of them are multi-factorial so there are a lot of feedback and feedforward
pathways that have to be figured out, and like the brain it becomes so complex that you can just
sit down and figure things out with pen and paper. You need to develop a computer matrix to
help figure things out
For anyone who is interesting in pursuing a bio informatics major/minor/concentration
how would you advise them?
It depends on your background. Youre in a much better position to do something interesting
and useful in bio informatics if you have a reasonably decent programming background. We get
a lot of biology students who either minor in bio informatics or go on to do a masters in bio

informatics, and the place where a lot of them struggle is where try to teach them programming.
They will learn some but that is the real stumbling block, so this is really a big advantage for
those who are in computer science and have an interest in bio informatics. You can take
somebody who says, yeah I am going to learn programming, but if they dont actually love it
enough to do it in their spare time then they are not going to get good at it. I think that is the
dividing line for between people who get excited about being able to get a computer to do
something interesting and the people who treat it as just a tedious task.
My last question is something I am very curious about. In my UWRT class I have been
writing about the idea of decoding a persons personality an uploading them into a
computer. Sense you have a vast experience in both neurology and computer science, do
you think this is possible?
It is kind of like the matrix actually. In theory the brain is a computer. It has trillions of
neurons, and its a little more subtle than it can be either on or off, yeah they generate action, but
they also can do computation where they just summon currents. In theory if you understood
enough about how the brain worked and if you had a big enough computer you could not only
achieve consciousness in a computer but you could transfer someones consciousness into a
computer and would not have to worry about dying. Everything you knew, everything you felt, all
of your emotions would be reproduced. So that would actually be a little scary because it would
mean someone could not die, unless of course someone were to pull the plug.

Contact Info:
Dr. Lawrence Mays: Bioinformatics 311, 704-687-8555, lemays@uncc.edu