Anyone know anything about Bioinformatics?
 

I'm a Computer Science major / Biology minor and I'm seriously thinking about going to graduate school for bioinformatics. Mainly because it sounds AWESOME, but in reality i don't know that much about it.

Do any of you guys know anything about the field? Good programs? Viability of the profession? Work environments? Etc..

Any and all input would be really great! :)

I support a couple of their projects.
 

First of all, how many stats classes do you have under your belt?

Have you taken any SAS or R classes? SAS or R are the big languages in that field.

Many of the work environments are hospitals, pharma companies, or research/hospital campuses (I work with a team of doctors with one SAS programmer over at a research/hospital campus).

Good luck!

I took stats back in high school, but honestly I should probably take it again, as my high school was pretty horrible at teaching math.

I haven't even heard or seen SAS or R. The comp sci program at Willamette is pretty small, and I really don't think they teach SAS or R, so it looks like I'll have to teach myself those. Would be able to learn them on my own or are they too advanced?

The number of statistical software analysis programs is massive. For example, another popular program is was Minitab. Even the NIST provides statistical analysis programs for free at www.nist.gov.

To appreciate the concept, read a 6 page article in Scientific American May 2009 by Katherine Pollard. It will not say much about programming (even though she apparently did most of it). But it does mention (in perspective) what is most important for someone with your interest. She used massive programming, eventually moved her programs to a supercomputer, to solve a simple statistical genetics search problem that apparently had significant importance to others.

People who do most of the programming (according to one I talked to from Wyeth) actually know very little about the science. These programmers are more like technicians with little science knowledge. They know how to pound the nails and where. But have little idea of what they are building or why it will stand. The architect also knows how to pound nails - but leaves such work to others.