Since 1995, I've been the Director of the [MMI Research Core http://www.ohsu.edu/research/core Facility] in the Molecular Microbiology & Immunology Dept. of the Oregon Health & Science University. My degree is in Medicinal Chemistry. In other words, I'm a chemist, not a programmer. But I got into Perl as part of my job administering some Unix machines a few years ago, and got hooked on being able to actually make a computer do what I want it to do, instead of having to buy an application that sort of does what I want. I use perl to automate various tasks in my lab. 
