About me!

Hi, I'm Logan Miller and I appreciate you taking the time to learn a bit more about me. I live in Henrico, Virginia and I am on my journey to becoming a great Software Engineer! It is a huge world out there and there is a lot to learn about programming today. To me, that is what makes this field exciting.

I started coding in middle school. For an english project, we were tasked on learning a skill and showing it off to the class, so I learned how to code in html and made a simple website. It was nothing impressive, just a bunch of headers and paragraphs. However it sparked the of joy for coding in my mind which still exists today. Seeing the work that I knew how to do pop up on the screen filled me with a sense of fufillment which was unique from anything else that I have experienced. This has motivated me to continue on my journey and develop my technical skills.

Now, I am finishing my Associates Degree in Computer Science at J. Sargeant Reynolds. I will be transferring this fall to finish my Bachelors Degree in Computer Science. Through my current enrollment, I have earned honors such as the dean's list and acceptance to Phi Theta Kappa. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time at Reynolds. I have never met someone who wasn't friendly or willing to talk about class or the passions they have outside of school. The teaching staff has been dedicated and thorough to making sure each student learns at their best.

My Research

During my time as a research assistant at VCU, I helped to aid research on Bacteriophages. I collaborated in a group of undergraduate students under Graduate Program Director Allison Johnson.

Bacteriophages are viruses which uniquely affect bacteria. During this position, I learned about commonly used bioinformatics tools such as BLASTp and Phamerator along with foundational ideas relating to phage genes. I used these skills to analyze genes from various phages and annotate their functions. The goal of this position was to learn more about phages recently discovered by VCU. I carried out annotation for a phage YungSlug, newly discovered in 2020. I learned about how bioinformatical data was stored and handled in these programs and used this knowledge to aid our research.

We had a question: How similar is YungSlug to other phages? Our tools allowed us to download the full genome from a vast amount of pre-sequenced examples. This allowed me to create a tool in java which compared the genetic similarity between phages. Adhering to the position of genes in the DNA, the program compared groups of nucleotides known as phams in order to develop a similarity score. Along with additional research from the group and Program Director, this supported the conclusion that YungSlug was a genetic outlier from all phages we had sequenced before. This research was collected and presented in the VCU UROP Poster Symposium.

• millerloc0806@gmail.com
• (804) 546-0156
• Henrico, VA 23228