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Bioinformatics Graduate Schools?

Posted by Cliff on from the flying-above-higher-education dept.

coopergm asks: "I am an undergraduate nearing graduation, majoring in Biology and Mathematics & Statistics, with a bit of Computer Science as support. What graduate school (PhD) programs out there are the best for computational biology and bioinformatics? Obviously, Stanford, MIT, and Washington University in St. Louis have a serious edge by virtue of being associated with one of the major human and mouse Genome Sequencing Centers. How would one differentiate between these three? Are there other schools offering competitive bioinformatics programs in terms of reputation, quality of research and educational experience?"

4 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. Cold Spring Harbor Lab by Alan+Shutko · · Score: 2

    Check out the Watson School. There are a number of bioinformatic groups there, and I hear they are pretty good.

    However, I'd recommend going to a school with a very strong CS curriculum. There are lots of people interested in bioinformatics right now, but unfortunately most think some perl or python will serve all their computing needs. It won't. The bioinformatics community needs more people with both biology knowledge _and_ a strong grounding in algorithms.

    I'd say MIT certainly has the computing knowledge, and I know several CS profs at Wash U who were heavily into the genome when I was there. So one of those would be good. You'll be much better able to advance the woeful state of bioinformatics if you can help come up with better ways to store and search things, than if you spend your time writing slow and crappy cgi scripts.

  2. Re:very few good options right now (UC Berkely goo by Alan+Shutko · · Score: 2

    I don't know where you learned about grad school, but grad school _is_ a real world discovery research environment. What else do you think you'd be doing if you were in a lab?

  3. UC Davis? by Dr.Dubious+DDQ · · Score: 2

    I actually don't know much about their bioinformatics program (other than the fact that it's new, and only for Graduate students...but that's another rant), but UC Davis has one. I don't imagine it can be too bad, being at a school already reasonably well known for it's biotech and medical programs...
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  4. ...and a question of my own. by Dr.Dubious+DDQ · · Score: 2

    Anybody know of any good Undergraduate programs that at least include actual bioinformatics in the curriculum?

    I'm an interested, independent (read:I have to pay for everything myself) adult student, having recently returned to college. The community college I attend (American River College in the Sacramento, California area, if it matters) recently started up a biotech program, but they've yet to offer anything involving bioinformatics, and as my previous post mentioned, UC Davis only offers it as a graduate program...

    (In a related but otherwise irrelevant note - it looks like the MPI port of fastDNAml is now available for download here. Time to play!)


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    "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
    --
    Hacker Public Radio is our Friend