I am a 5th year computational biology student, and have yet to take any real coursework in theoretical biology, despite the fact that most of what I do could be broadly classified as exactly that.
Theoretical biology seems to be the black sheep of both the wet-lab biology and simulation communities, a situation that I wish were different, but honestly it can be difficult to make a compelling case for the role/yield of theory in biology beyond a few simple models and natural selection etc.
It's frustrating, because I think the most fruitful area we can work on is developing a better understanding / mathematical formulation of the incredibly high dimensional, nonlinear, stochastic spaces that biological systems live in, but it's difficult to see the way forward because no on (that I know of) is putting time into thinking about it.
As someone who's considering using system dynamics to model musculoskeletal systems, I'd be interested in your experiences. Could you pm me your email?
I work at the cellular/molecular scales in a computational biology program; musculoskeletal stuff can often find a home in bioengineering departments. Not sure how much insight I can offer, but feel free to shoot me an email, my contact info is here: http://www.pitt.edu/~donovanr/
Theoretical biology seems to be the black sheep of both the wet-lab biology and simulation communities, a situation that I wish were different, but honestly it can be difficult to make a compelling case for the role/yield of theory in biology beyond a few simple models and natural selection etc.
It's frustrating, because I think the most fruitful area we can work on is developing a better understanding / mathematical formulation of the incredibly high dimensional, nonlinear, stochastic spaces that biological systems live in, but it's difficult to see the way forward because no on (that I know of) is putting time into thinking about it.