What can I do? I have a bachelor's degree in mathematics...mostly useless, I suppose. Been writing software professionally for 15 years. I've always wondered how can I make the jump, and contribute as a reasonably skilled and experienced developer (as opposed to in a scientific capacity, as a biologist could; bioinformatics analysis, etc. Although I'm kind of interested in that, too).
Many of the most promising potential routes to solving the hardest biology problems are heavily maths and software dependent. We use high-throughput techniques to generate a lot of data of different types, then use mathematical insights and computational power to reduce the data, then more maths and machine learning to extract meaning.
That maths degree probably means, at the least, that you're comfortable learning graph theory, combinatorics, discrete optimisation, probability theory, etc. These things are the foundation of systems and computational biology.
The software development skills are also sorely needed - a huge proportion of computational biology software is unusable outside of the lab that developed it, and well-engineered software underpins a LOT of successful research. Many great ideas go wasted due to lack of good programmers to implement them properly.
I would say there are two ways in:
1. Stay in your current job, and do hobby work collaborating with scientists to write scientific FOSS and publish it. If you're interested in this, I have a long list of ideas.
2. Transition to science - get a job in a bio lab or at a computational biology/genomics institute. Depending on the specific problem you want to work on and where in the world you are, I can suggest places.
Yeah. I have or could reacquire comfort with those topics.
I live in the Boulder, Colorado area, and I've even applied recently for a job at a biotech firm. There are plenty around here. Only saw that one job opening, though.
Beyond that, I just don't have the vision or lack the key insight on where to go or what to do next. That's where your item (1) would come into play, I suppose. I need to be guided. It's a difficult position to be in. I'm basically saying "I have skills and want to contribute, but need a step by step guide, and probably continuing guidance along the way, before I can contribute anything valuable."
I work as a computational epidemiologist, and believe me, there's plenty of room for good, committed developers - helping make tools for scientists run better, run faster, and be more accessible to people beyond just the folks that coded them.
Feel free to get in touch with me if you'd like to chat.
Thanks, I'm interested in chatting. No idea how to contact you though, and there doesn't appear to be any contact info associated with your user profile, that I can see.
I too would be very interested in learning more about how to break in to this type of work. I am a few years out of school with a CS and Math degree, and no clue where to start. I didn't see any contact info in your profile.
