Slashdot Mirror
Career Choices for Computational Biologists?
wengkius writes "I'm entering grad school this year and will be working towards a higher degree in Computational Biology. While my undergraduate training has been in computer science, I'm looking to apply what I've learned in a new area that has piqued my interest. Now my question is this: apart from the obvious career choices that I have thought of (academic research, pharma corporations, biotech startups), are there any other career options that I have yet to consider? Would be great to hear from Slashdotters who are familiar with the field."
My advice -- be familiar with the tools and techniques, and pick a fun and collaborative project. Whether computational chemistry (my field) or biology, the tools that you use can and will be applied elsewhere. Being familiar with measures of similarity (Tanimoto similarity, for instance), has implications to multiple fields, as does multivariate modeling (PLS, SVMs, K-nearest-neighbor models, etc). I know several grads who 'jumped ship' to market analysis/market prediction (think brokerages and Wall Street). The point is, you become an expert in your field, and have the offers come to you.
Cheers,
-Mike
If a man's character is to be abused there's nobody like a relative to do the business. -Thackeray, William
Check the National Institutes of Health (http://www.nih.gov/) and search for Computational Biology. You're going to find a lot about genome research. In fact there is a whole site devoted to it (http://www.genome.gov/).
You can also check out the Occupational Outlook Handbook (http://www.bls.gov/OCO/) provided by the US Dept. of Labor. You can look around their site, altho' it's not very easy to find exactly what you're looking for.
But I have to wonder, have you talked to any of your professors? What about friends of your family in somewhat related professions?
Good luck.
Later . . . Jim
I work in a computational biology department at a research institution. Everyone I know is either in academic or government research. My only degrees are in Computer Science... I get the biology knowledge I need from my collaborators. Maybe I don't understand your question? What are you hoping to hear? If you are planning on studying for a higher degree in computational biology, that pretty much limits your career choice to "computer scientist working with biology or medical researchers". You are likely to find a job wherever one finds biology and medical researchers (as you noted, academic/government research institutions, biotechs, and pharmaceutical companies). To get a sampling of what jobs in the field look like and what sorts of companies/institutions hire such people, try the International Society for Computational Biology and look at their jobs section.
Additionally, knowing what one would want to go into after grad school is essential for making choices about grad school. It's not like he's considering going for a generic "PhD, good for all things that a PhD is good for."
I am an academic, so I only know academia and a little biotech, but I do know that if you have a good background in computers and a good background in biology, you will be able to find lots great jobs for the next 10 years at least in academia or in biotech.
Genomics or protein biochemistry are probably the best fields to head toward.
Genomics will be more skewed toward academia I would think, but there would be a job for you at monsanto if you were interested in corn genomes. Nonetheless, research into genomes is all computer driven and in constant need of people who are more computer minded, and is of course very important.
Protein folding would get you a very good job at any major academic institution and would probably get you a really high paying job at any pharmecutical.
If you're equally interested in both, I would say go toward protein folding, as you're going to be able to find a good post-doc in more places and/or get hired immediately by a pharmecutical for lots of bling.
I wouldn't think that biotech startups would be as a general rule as good to shoot for right after grad school, but that really depends on the startup. It just seems to me that an established pharmecutical giant would be a sure thing, and you would have more funding.
I have a PhD in neuroscience, and have worked as a software engineer and as a computational biologist. If you want an academic career and to end up as a professor, then yes, you have many years of postdoc and suffering ahead of you. On the other hand, my experience is that the barrier between computational biology and other high tech/software work is very porous. Learn as broadly as you can: biology, machine learning, data analysis techniques... Unless you are going for the academic career, breadth is more important than depth, and if you keep your eyes and ears open you will find many and varied opportunities.
Here are some concrete examples: at my previous computational biology job at the Broad Institute, my group was mostly PhD mathematicians and physicists. Several of us left around the same time, and I am now at Akamai while others are at Google.
Good luck