
Ask HN: How to move into computational biology? - smattiso
I have CS and Applied math degrees and ten years of software development experience (Google, Amazon...). I&#x27;d like to migrate towards companies such as Calico, Human Longevity Inc, etc, yet many require PhDs in Comp Biology. Is getting a PhD the best usage of time or is there a way to self study the basics and learn on the job? My statistics knowledge is admittedly pretty poor at this point.
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the_decider
I have a Phd in computational biology. Myself and many other computational
biologists I know are moving away from the field; transitioning into Data
Science, AI, and Natural Language Processing (many of the sequence analytics
techniques transfer quite well to NLP). The reason for this Biotech companies
treat scientists very poorly, offering them low salaries and a lack of
respect. This particularly true for companies like Calico. A friend of mine
from grad-school was asked to join Calico during its founding stage. He was
promised the world. Instead, he was forced to subsist of a post-doc's salary
for years and years. So my advice to you is to stay away from Comp Bio.
Consider transitioning into NLP instead.

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smattiso
Interesting. As part of your Comp Bio PhD did you learn the fundamentals of AI
research? How are you planning to transition?

