Profile: Lennart Martens

Personal background
I am a doctoral research fellow at the dept. of Biochemistry, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, University Ghent (UG) in Belgium.
I am a native Belgian from the Dutch-speaking part (Flanders), educated in maths and sciences and graduated in biotechnology. I spent a year working in the commercial IT sector, primarily honing my skills in enterprise Java (J2EE) but returned to the university because I didn't want to spend my life coding business systems.
My current research focuses on bioinformatics tools for protein identification based on mass spectrometric data.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I am not participating in the Seti project because I believe in green, googly-eyed aliens sending us direct messages. I do however try to keep a healthy open mind when it comes to life elsewhere in the universe. In my opinion, this alien life will probably be more likely to be primitive than 'evolved', but hey - who knows or dares to dream? ;-)
I think the greatest thing to happen to the project could be stumbling across TV or radio-like signals from another civilization - this would give us the opportunity to get to know or 'neighbours' quietly and maybe even unnoticed. A voyeuristic kind of cosmic eavesdropping, if you will. It will give us a chance to get used to the idea of not being alone at any rate!
Concerning this topic, we're also in that league ourselves, i.e.: we've been broadcasting meaningful EM signals into the galaxy for decades now, creating a sphere of activity that spans quite a few lightyears! So actively broadcasting to me seems to be an open door - we're doing it at this very time and have been doing it for a long time now! The only problem with this broadcasting is the information we're sending... Maybe we shouldn't always be too proud of what's going out into the ether... Ah, but at least we're being fair ;-).
The main reason for me to participate is that I have an unhealthy interest in the concept of Seti (offline distributed processing) and it also gives me the chance to be a small player in the world's most performant supercomputer.
So I dedicate the spare cycles of my Toshiba Satellite Pro 6000 1Ghz machine to this noble cause!

Keep up the good work, and see you around!
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