Marie Webster, recent Ph. D. graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine with a major in Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences, is working at her lab in Philadelphia. She reports that bioinformatics is going to be big in the next few years and it is an important application of computer science. Even now, there is more data than can be analyzed.
Bioinformatics is the application of computer science and related fields to biology and medicine. It obviously requires several computer science courses, so those interested in the field should take computer science courses in high school.
See how CS can be applied by checking out this section of a job posting at a great lakes company for a bioinformatics scientist. It includes as pluses these areas related to computer science:
+ Biological data mining software, such as Partek or Spotfire
+ Relational databases: SQL; MS Access, Oracle, MySQL, or PostgreSQL; relational database design principles
+ C++
+ Java
+ High performance computing
+ Biological data visualization
Marie presented her dissertation work last October, got her degree in December, and participated in graduation ceremonies Thursday, May 24, 2012. Congratulations, Marie!