Hi everyone. First of all, I'd give you some basic overview of me.
I am a graduated student in the CS and Applied Math. Сloser to the end of my education I became interested in biology, genetics etc and also started participating in population genetics lectures at my University as a auditor. I'm pretty good at programming in java, python, R, applied math and statistics. Now I'm getting master's degree in Data analysis and have a bioinformatics project as a thesis. I'm very interested in biology, genetics and especially in computer biology algorithms.
My questions are:
- What skills and knowledge should junior bioinformatician have to start work?
- Is there any opportunities to start work at any company (not as University department/lab employee)?
I should explain the second question in more details. My problem is that I don't want to be a researcher (scientist way) and I've come across only with people who works as a bioinformatician scientist.
Is there a place for a guy, who just wants to make code and use apply math and modeling in biology? (without researching, publishing articles etc.)
Thanks for answers and sorry for my English.
Yes, there are many jobs like that in the industry. (Would you like job like this? Or are there any job offers that caught your eye? Just to know better what your expectations are.)
Yes, that's very similar to what i expected. But the main problem of such positions is experience. Where i can get real experience on the start?
Bioinformatics is a pretty broad field, so it depends more on what you're interested in or what the job requires.
At the very least you'll want to be familiar with processing and analyzing NGS data, so all of the various x-Seq methods (RNA-Seq, ChIP-Seq, etc). So qc, assembly (reference and de novo), differential expression, variant calling, and etc. The tricky part is that sort of forms a basis for a ton of different things depending on the biology you're interested in. Everything from finding bacteria living in bear poop to identifying instances of positive selection associated with Lassa virus infection.
There's also Mass Spec, Methylation, structural data, and so on.
If you're interested in applying math, you could explore other areas, computational biology, synthetic biology and etc.
Not really sure what you mean by not doing research in a "scientist way", that's the point of this stuff more or less. If you're doing science, you're a scientist, regardless of who signs your check. Maybe you meant you'd like to be involved in applied work? I wouldn't rule out working for an academic institute, you could be part of a bioinformatics core in a lab/facility/department/etc.
yep, that's what I meant. Thanks for your detailed comment.
Well, everything is science/research more or less, so I wasn't really sure what you meant. By applied I mean applying bioinformatics to research focused on developing technology or a product (drug, diagnostic, software, etc).
Hi! We're now setting up a small spin-off in Moscow in the field of bioinformatics of immune repertoire sequencing, which is quite young and fascinating area. It is mostly software-oriented and can perhaps meed your needs in the terms of getting experience. You can contact me (my nickname)@gmail.com if you're interested.
As for your initial question, I believe that it will be generally hard to get a position without experience, unless one has a strong academic record.