Job:Bioinformatics Jobs You Can Do From Home?

Question

[Ivana]

I would like to know if there are some jobs you can mostly work from home. I live in small country (Croatia) and bioinformatics jobs are very rare. I would like to find a bioinformatics freelance job and I don't know what kind of job to look for or what education do I need. I have a degree in biotechnology and I worked as a volunteer in one bioinformatics laboratory during my faculty where I gathered and analysed data. I started learning Python a while ago to improve my knowledge. I would appreciate any answer! Thank you very much!

[vikash]

Hello Ivana, there is plenty of work from home jobs. You may look for home-based work here.

Answer 1

[Mary]

One area you might consider is curation. There is a huge need for people who understand the biology, aren't afraid of a bit of computation--but not all jobs require heavy coding--and can talk to people who do the software side.

There's an international organization of curators that might offer some other guidance: http://www.biocurator.org/home.shtml

I have known a number of curators who worked from home. That said, it might require you to structure yourself into a little company of some sort to make getting contracts easier. I don't know how that works outside of the US.

Some people won't consider that bioinformatics per se, but you will be associated with bioinformatics groups and programs with this kind of work.

[Ivana]

Thank you very much for your help! I was looking something like this!

Answer 2

[Daniel Standage]

There is a great thread here on BioStar about bioinformatics consulting you might want to look at. Bioinformatics Consulting Thoughts

[Ivana]

Thank you for URL I found it very helpfull!

Answer 3

[Giovanni M Dall'Olio]

If you feel very confident you can have a look at the challenges proposed by innocentive.com or by Kaggle.

Another option is to participate to an open source project like The Synaptic Leap, part of the Tropicaldisease project, which aims at creating an online community to ultimately find a cure for many neglected diseases.

In January/February you can start looking at the application calls for the Google Summer of Code projects; see this question for hints.

The other answers, working as a curator or to consulting, are very good idea.

In any case, unfortunately the skill needed for entering in this field may be a big too high. You should consider going abroad to make some experience in a laboratory of bioinformatics.

[User 59]

Innocentives was my first thought as well, I don't know of any online clearing house for bioinformatics work, unlike the numerous ones available for coding projects.

[Ivana]

Thank you for the ideas. They are great and I will try one of them. I know I need much more experience in this field and I'm considering going abroad to make it. Your links expanded may views in term of what is possible to do.

[Yannick Wurm]

@Daniel: yes I think there is a need for that kind of "online clearing house". I'd like to be able to hire bioinformatics freelancer for specific needs once in a while ('I need format xx convert to yy', 'I need you to make my one-time-hack into a robust pipeline with unit tests'... )

Answer 4

[Andra Waagmeester]

There is the Mechanical Turk of Amazon http://www.mturk.com. I have experienced a bit with this platform, both as a requestor and worker. The revenue's are though small. I am not sure if you can make a living on mturk. But looking at the quality of results I received as a requestor, people apparently do. It would be nice to have more bioinformaticians on the workers side. Mturk does have the disadvantage that it is mainly oriented on the US. As a non us citizen, you get paid in Amazon vouchers.

Another option might be http://www.vworker.com, but I haven't tried that yet. It used to be known as rentacoder, but recently changed its name to cover a broader audience. Testing it is on my to do list.

Answer 5

[Codemanky]

Another Open Source project similar to The Synaptic Project is OSDD. Open Source Drug Discovery(OSDD) is a project initiated by CSIR,India for discovering new drugs for TB. There are interesting projects that involve data mining, virtual screening of drugs, annotation and curation.

[Eric Normandeau]

Hi Codemanky. Nice suggestion. However, editing the tags of a question to reflect your answer is NOT encouraged. Cheers

[Codemanky]

More than one answer here is pointing to an open source/collaborative drug discovery platform. I thought there should be a tag to point those answers. I wonder why there is a Python tag? Neither the question nor answers here discuss about Python. -:)

Answer 6

[archana.bioinfo87]

Hi, you can also login in upwork and do work from home.

See this link https://www.upwork.com/