Who are you and how did you choose the bioinformatics path?
I am Maira Nikoghosyan, a Bioinformatics Ph.D. student at Russian-Armenian University (RAU) and a researcher at the Bioinformatics group (BIG) of the Institute of Molecular Biology NAS RA. I started studying Bioinformatics in 2013 during my bachelor’s at RAU. During the study, I discovered BIG, which was the only group in Armenia focused on genomic bioinformatics research. I joined BIG as a trainee and later became a team member. In 2017 I started my first research project, which in the future became my master’s thesis. The topic of the project was the analysis of the genetic variations, which increase the risk of disease development in different populations. I continued to develop that research topic, and now it is my Ph.D. project.