Ask HN: How to move into computational biology?

3 pointssmattiso2 comments

I have CS and Applied math degrees and ten years of software development experience (Google, Amazon...). I'd like to migrate towards companies such as Calico, Human Longevity Inc, etc, yet many require PhDs in Comp Biology. Is getting a PhD the best usage of time or is there a way to self study the basics and learn on the job? My statistics knowledge is admittedly pretty poor at this point.

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I have a Phd in computational biology. Myself and many other computational biologists I know are moving away from the field; transitioning into Data Science, AI, and Natural Language Processing (many of the sequence analytics techniques transfer quite well to NLP). The reason for this Biotech companies treat scientists very poorly, offering them low salaries and a lack of respect. This particularly true for companies like Calico. A friend of mine from grad-school was asked to join Calico during its founding stage. He was promised the world. Instead, he was forced to subsist of a post-doc's salary for years and years. So my advice to you is to stay away from Comp Bio. Consider transitioning into NLP instead.

Interesting. As part of your Comp Bio PhD did you learn the fundamentals of AI research? How are you planning to transition?

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