Name: Lina Faller
Hometown: Wakefield, Massachusetts

A small group of teenage boys sit in a high school classroom waiting for their computer science class to begin. In walks Lina Faller. The boys stare at her. She knows what they’re thinking:

Is she in the right class?

She is.

She won’t be here long.

Wrong again. Lina thrived in that class and enjoyed CS so much, she went on to take an advanced level C++ class her junior year. When it came time to think about college, Lina knew she would major in CS. She liked the logical aspect of programming.

Choosing the right college took a little more effort. Lina had planned to go to school in her home state of Massachusetts, but she also applied to UNH as a back up school. When Lina came to visit UNH, she was blown away by how beautiful the area was. She liked the small, secluded campus, which was more appealing than the Boston schools her friends were attending. She was also excited about UNH’s InterOperability Laboratory (IOL), a world-class testing laboratory that works side by side with leading technology companies to improve their products before they get to market. She learned of the IOL during a freshman open house. She then got a job there working for the wireless consortium testing wireless access points and wireless cards for various companies. Working at the IOL, Lina was on the cutting edge of wireless technology, learning about the latest advances in connection speed and security.

“The job is really more of a learning experience, and I would say everyone should do it just for the experience.”

The other draw to UNH was that it offered coursework in her two interests: CS and Japanese. Lina, who is bilingual in her native German as well as English, has always had a knack for languages. But lately, she’s been focusing more on yet another interest: biology.

Lina is the first undergraduate student to major in the computer science department’s Bioinformatics option. Bioinformatics involves developing and utilizing computer programs to crunch biological data. Students in the program learn to use their computer programming skills to develop such programs while simultaneously getting some background in the biological sciences. Lina, for instance worked on a program this summer that sorts through the genomes of fungi and bacteria species and looks for repeating patterns known as microsatellites. The work Lina is doing in this area is a project that Computer Science professor R. Daniel Bergeron and Biochemistry Professor Kelley Thomas developed. Lina’s work for the project is being funded through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program.

Lina’s experience in Bioinformatics has helped expand her own as well as others’ conceptions of what computer science is all about.

“It’s made people realize that there’s more to CS than writing data structures,” she said. “There are so many areas where you can use these skills.”

- Rachel G. Purnell, CS Department Staff