Bio

Alexandre Soares has a drive for challenges, and admires aesthetics and simplicity. Computers have been part of his life since he was 10 years old, when he won a superb 48 KB device. His academic background is in biology from Universidade Estadual de Campinas and in physics from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, both in Brazil. During his MSc in biochemistry, Alexandre found, after visiting the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997, that a local anesthetic changes the spatial pattern of lipids in artificial and natural membranes. The changing of the spatial pattern can take part in the mechanism of anesthesia. There he first learned about Mathematica. He has another MSc in computational physics on the critical exponents and an anomalous diffusion of a classical Heisenberg model. During his PhD, he has been able to merge population genetics and statistical physics to solve the major problem of how mutation rates are established in asexual populations. In his latter graduate researches, he adopted principles of project management. Alexandre believes his blend of creativity and analytical thinking lead to a unique approach to the generation of ideas and problem-solving. He values interdisciplinarity, knowledge, and fundamental questions, which motivates him to search for as many applications as feasible. He considers himself a hipster and a hacker, while he is eager to achieve the skills of a hustler, in a startup parlance. Reducing complexity to serve and empower people is his mission. Currently he is interested in collaborative work. Alexandre sees a great overlap between his own mission and the one of Wolfram Research, and is hopeful about the potential of a lasting mutual relationship between them.

Foster: Assisting lab students from automated reports

Foster is a website that allows teachers to customize input forms for lab classes and to monitor experiments while they happen and after they are finished. Monitoring is provided by analyzing the output of his/her students and generating automated reports at request.