Profile
Francesco De Batté
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About Me:
I’m very into coding and playing video games. I’m hoping to learn to code some games of my own! I learned all about how plants grow and evolve at university and since then have loved going to botanic gardens and admiring all the pretty plants, now that I appreciate them for how they got to be that way.
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I have a lot of other interests too, maybe we can chat about them if you’re curious 🙂
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My pronouns are:
he/him
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My Work:
I use computers and experiments to try and understand how bacteria evolve, and how we can make them evolve differently. Hopefully, this’ll be useful to synthetic biologists, people who use living things like bacteria to do useful things like making important chemicals and materials.
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The main method I’m using is agent-based modelling, a kind of simulation where you simulate a group of bacteria as “agents” and you go in a big loop at each time step, where you update each agent based on what the other agents are doing. That way, you only have to do simple computations but you end up simulating a very complex system of lots of interacting parts.
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My Typical Day:
I wake up some time between 6 and 9 am, depending on how tired I was yesterday. I do a bit of exercise in the morning, maybe watch some youtube while I eat breakfast, then go to work. When I’m at work, I talk to people about all kinds of things and I do coding and experiments. I love talking to people at lunch – I get to learn all about the cool science they do, and other things they find interesting. After lunch I do some more work, then head home. I’m usually thinking about my work when I’m at home too, especially when I’m not busy playing video games or watching youtube.
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As a PhD student, my time is pretty flexible. I don’t use an alarm to wake up, since I tend to wake up before 8:30am and usually that’s early enough. I get to the university where I work either by walking or by bike depending on the weather. It’s not a short journey, but it gives me time to clear my head and appreciate the world around me before my busy day begins. When I get to work, it’s usually a lot of coding at my desk or experiments in the lab. I also have lots of meetings to talk to people about what I’m doing, what they’re doing, and how we could work together. I do enjoy talking to people quite a lot, which is part of the reason I’m looking forward to talking to you! I have lunch with my colleagues and we talk about science and what we did on the weekend and whatever else we find interesting. Then I do some more work in the afternoon and go home whenever I feel like I’ve done all I want to do today – sometimes that’s pretty early, sometimes it can be 6pm.
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What I'd do with the prize money:
I’d spend it on getting lessons and training so that I can make educational video games. I really like thinking about science and I’d love to share that with other people in as fun a way as possible!
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
biologist and programmer
What did you want to be after you left school?
A scientist
Were you ever in trouble at school?
Almost never - sometimes I wish I hadn't been so afraid to get in trouble every now and then
If you weren't doing this job, what would you choose instead?
Maybe a maths teacher
Who is your favourite singer or band?
NF
What's your favourite food?
Pasta
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
More time to be PhD student, a little bit more money (they don't pay us a lot), to stay as happy as I am right now
Tell us a joke.
A house was ripped from the ground by a big tornado, but surprisingly it was happy. As it flew away with glee it shouted "hooray! I'm floorless!"
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