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Comment by otoburb | Hacker News Reader

Is there any chance that you would wish to initiate research part-time in your field? I would presume any self-funded research program would need to be limited in scope and heavily weighted towards computational citizen science, which seems to be where your growing skillset can be readily applied.

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>computational citizen science,

This is actually a good approach. As a former bio PhD now in software, I am working on some side projects in the area.

I would definitely be interested. One the biggest problems is that the barrier for entry to do any type of laboratory science is really high (lab space, equipment, expensive kits and reagents, etc) compared to software. I think bioinformatics is a good place to start.

FourSigma and IndianAstronaut, what do you think about doing bioinformatics as research, formulating and testing hypotheses, and then either using a cloud lab or a garage lab for at least some wetlab testing?

I've been researching intensively whether to go get a life sciences PhD, and I'm now leaning instead toward just learning bioinformatics and ML, with the wetlab stuff as an adjunct. If that's an effective way to do "real research", then it might be more accessible.

I would 100% lean towards to a more computational skill set while having some exposure to a wet-lab experimentation. I think having a data science skill set in biology is becoming extremely valuable. Moreover, if you choose to leave academia you have a set of skills that are in high demand across a range of industries.

Thanks for the advice! That's very helpful to fold into my research/analysis of next steps. :-)

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