I am a PhD student trying to plan for the future. My fiancee and I are both in the Bioinformatics field. He will be starting his own graduate program in the next few years and I will be finishing mine up around this time as well. We want to start researching cities that have both solid computational biology/bioinformatics graduate programs (with an emphasis on math and computer science) AND tons of industry and/or academic bioinformatics positions for post-docs.
I'm straddling a desire for industry (with a stronger line between work and play) and academia (more freedom to research what you like, granted you find funding for what you like). I'm leaning towards industry because I DO like to separate work and play but am very passionate about the methodologies I have been acquiring in graduate school. I should state that I am primarily interested in neurological disorders (of the degenerative and dissociative flavors) and especially mental disorder research (affective, psychotic and developmental - Axis I of the DSM, etc).
Right now, we have a very BROAD concept of what cities are right for both of us, but we need a lot more information. In general, we are targeting the east and west coasts, because we have heard of specific bioinformatics hubs and because we like the "scenes" of these cities, but we could be missing other hubs and scenes, as we are relatively new to the field. These are the cities and respective programs we currently are looking at (below). Can anyone speak about the job opportunities in these cities, particularly for neuro-bioinformatic researchers? Also, is the city you comment on hard to live in and what are people like (in your opinion) - kind, irritable, warm, nilhilistic, stoic, extroverted, antisocial, etc? We have our own personal impressions but any modifiers/personal insights will help!
Cities/Universities:
- Palo Alto / Stanford
- San Diego / UCSD
- Santa Cruz / UCSC
- San Francisco / UCSF
- Seattle / UW
- Boston / Harvard, MIT
- New York / Princeton (in NJ, a bit of a commute here...)
- New Haven / Yale
Thank you for your thoughts!
If you're interested in industry with a neuro-angle to it then I suspect Boston will be your best bet, since Novartis has a newish center there.
I did my PhD (neuroscience) at UCSF and can recommend the SF area as a really great (though absurdly expensive) place to live.
You might wanna check out the labs at Mount Sinai School of Medicine (http://icahn.mssm.edu). I'm sure there are quite a few folks working on neuro-degenerative disorders. If you'd like to work on Autism, check out http://icahn.mssm.edu/research/centers/seaver-autism-center