Permanent/Long Term Jobs In Bioinformatics

Question

[Pappu]

I am wondering if any member of the community did research on the current job market on Bioinformatics/Computational Biology and the possibilities of obtaining Permanent/Long term positions after PhD.

As far as I understood, in many places tenure track positions are for professors. But often bioinformaticians contribute to the analysis part of the project and does not get 1st author paper which is required for a tenure track position. They get 1st author paper by developing some kind or database/method and get positions to maintain them. How about those supporting crew members? So my question is as as follows:

Is it possible for a bioinformatician to get a long term position, obtain funding, plan and a biomarker/drug development project to collaborate with experimentalists to execute them? If yes, what soft of experience and publication does he need? Or one has to always play the second fiddle doing what being asked to (taking part in useless project from the mind of PI) in order to maintain the job?

I am sorry if such question is off the topic, ambiguous and does not meet the requirements for posting of this discussion group.

Answer 1

[Emily]

I think the answer is that anything's possible.

In terms of research you can work in a wet lab or in a bioinformatics-only lab, following the usual academic career path. There are bioinformatics-only research groups, who perhaps collaborate with wet-labs or who work on published/open access data. Depending on the research group they'd probably want you to be generally competent in bioinformatics and have some coding ability, but since you'd be surrounded by other bioinformaticians there'd be plenty of people to learn from. There are bioinformaticans working in wet-labs, working with the wet-labbers to plan and analyse their large-scale experiments. The degree of autonomy and paper authorship really depends on the individuals in the lab - some PIs will really let you get your teeth into stuff and give you first author papers, others will just regard you as a lackey for other lab-members, hopefully you'll work out which one they are before you take the job. For this they'd be looking for general familiarity with a variety of bioinformatics resources and techniques, as you would, at least from a bioinformatics perspective, be flying solo so you would be responsible for your own learning.

Longer term jobs are more on the service side. There are bioinformatics service teams at wet-lab research institutes, where you have temporary collaborations with different wet-labs getting you lots of papers but unlikely first author. Collaborations are likely to be directed by the wet-labber and can be quite difficult as they are unlikely to involve you in any early planning of experiments but expect you to get the data out of these experiments, which is not always possible because they've done the wrong experiment. Again you'd want general familiarity with bioinformatics but you would be part of a small team of bioinformaticians to collaborate with and learn from. There are also jobs working for bioinformatics resources (eg I work for Ensembl) where you work on maintaining the resource and developing new tools for it. For this you really need to be a coder and to be relatively familiar with the resource in question, but the rest of the team will help you to learn the specifics.

I'm sure there are plenty of other options out there that other people will elaborate on. This is just my quick summary. In general, I think bioinformaticians have more alternative options than wet-labbers, but the traditional career path is still there.

[Pappu]

Thank you for your clarification. I am a postdoc working in a wet lab group who are interested in simulations, bioinformatics, evolution etc. So I am leading the computational effort of the lab apart from doing some microscopy experiments mostly from samples made by PhD students. I completed PhD in a joint collaboration of experimental and theoretical group. I had a postdoc position in a reputed bioinformatics group but I wanted to get involved in real scientific projects rather than developing/maintaining some websites/databases. I was trained as a biologist but went more into in silico due to complexity of my projects and was more successful and interested in that. I realized that often PIs plan experiments wrongly without any bioinformatic knowledge i.e. trying to work with mostly disordered protein. So I am interested in leading a group where predictions based on bioinformatics will be made and validated experimentally. But it seems rather impossible for me. Many experimentalists got benefited from my predictions/modelling although some PIs said these are bogus computer games..

Answer 2

[gammyknee]

In genomics-based labs, I think Bioinformaticians are (or at least in my experience) much better equipped to get high-profile journal articles and in turn have greater chances of getting professorships or tenured positions. Its such a large part of a research project and therefore you have a greater chance to impact the research paper. From my dealings with other labs, I have seen what you've described but in the opposite direction. Wet-lab scientists are really getting left behind because the important analysis is done computationally.

If you have a look at many of the major genomics centres around the world, most are headed by computational biologists or Genomics-based researchers. These people have the skills to know where the research is heading and innovative analyses to access discoveries. Universities will be slower to adopt more computational leadership (as "old school" geneticists retire), but its only a matter of time.