In high school, Dr. David Kelley was very good at math. However, his real passion was baseball. Or more specifically, it was beating his friends at fantasy baseball.

After discovering the world of baseball statistics, he realized that his mathletic skills might actually give him an edge. He learned everything he could about how the numbers worked so that he could line his team with the best possible players. And more often than chance, it worked. 

When he got to college, his goal became to make some extra cash on the side. So, he turned once again to math. This time, the target was poker, and he managed to turn his knowledge of probabilities into a serious paycheck. 

Since math kept paying off, he kept pursuing it. And since it was a great way to expand his toolkit, he decided to add computer science into the mix. As the classes became more advanced, he started looking for more advanced problems to solve, and found them in an unexpected place: biology.

He became fascinated by questions about evolution and consciousness and what makes humans, humans. Just as with baseball and poker, he wasn’t too concerned with whether or not it made sense to other people; he knew there must be a way that math could help. 

For the past ten years, Dr. Kelley has been at the forefront of a fast-growing field called computational biology. He uses all of his skills to build mutually beneficial bridges between questions about the human genome and the increasingly complex technological tools that we need to answer them. As he’s able to apply more advanced methods, like machine learning, the biological questions that his team can ask advances too. Just like his days as a student, he’s built a career that allows him to take what he’s good at and use it to pursue what he cares about.

And most importantly, in his free time, he still uses math to beat his friends at fantasy sports.