I am very excited by the vision and problems found in genomic medicine. It allows me to do meaningful, impactful work while working on challenging software engineering-style problems. I am very strongly considering applying to a masters / phD program in genomics/ bioinformatics in the near future. However, I just want to make sure that I haven't overly romanticized this field in my head.
- What is the best way for me to get involved/ get more exposure to this field right now?
- What are some good journals/ blogs I can subscribe to?
- There are a lot of free online courses, which ones would you recommend?
I currently work as a backend developer at a electronic health-care services company in SF, and really like my job. I am NOT looking for a new job. I work a normal ~40 hours week, so I still have a lot of free time. I like to stay busy and want to pick up a project I can work on in my free time. I don't care about getting paid for this, I just want to find a cool project I can dive into and get more exposure.
Relevant background if helps:
- I interned last summer at a personalized medicine startup and loved the project I worked on (using machine learning techniques to create a model that successfully predicts the genomic coordinates of disease causing variants from their positions on unspecified transcripts).
- For my thesis, I worked with an AI Professor and my former internship supervisor to discover 2 functions that significantly improve the pathogenicity prediction of splice site mutations based on NNSplice scores.
