

Ask HN: Computational Biology/Bioinformatics - what's it worth? - jcfrei

Hi HN<p>I'm currently contemplating doing another master in computational biology, however it's still kinda hard to find any people working in this field. Are there any members in the HN community who did a similar degree and have working experience? What are your main tasks at your company? Is this a master that is in demand (in the US)? Relocation would most likely not be a problem for me.<p>I'm also considering going the academic route, but as we all know, that's a very difficult route and I don't see myself doing one postdoc after another without any outlook for a position at the university.
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dalke
Depending on the subfield of computational biology you are in, you might try
contacting one of the mailing lists or discussion forums. For example,
<http://www.biostars.org/> is a stack-exchange-like site for bioinformatics,
and I see there have been some questions there regarding careers, however,
with few answers.

If you're working with perl or python, then there are the respective bioperl
and biopython mailing lists.

But "computational biology" covers a huge number of subfields, so you should
dig up more about what you're interested in. Medical informatics? Pathways?
Protein folding? Neuroscience? Something else?

~~~
jcfrei
thnx for the pointers! I'll dig into that and make up my mind about which
subfield I'm most interested in.

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dawson
I was once a Technical Lead at the European Bioinformatics Institute (for a
short time) at the Genome Campus in Cambridge. I have since founded a health
startup, happy to help if I can, email is in my profile.

