For the last several years, I lived my life as a full-time student, single mom, and all around exhausted person. I had a singular focus that I hoped would later lead me to a fulfilling career: finish my B.S. in Biology, specializing in Microbiology and Infectious Diease, and head off to graduate school to get my PhD. I did everything a good future graduate student does. I worked as hard as possible to maintain a high GPA, went to class during the day, took care of my kids in the evening, and spent half the night working on homework and studying. I joined a lab at school to get the necessary experience to help me be a good graduate student candidate, and later, a good graduate student. I was living and breathing Microbiology and well on my way to acheiving my goal. How, then, did someone so dedicated to Biology become a data enthusist?
The truth is, it isn’t that far of a leap from Biologist to a Data Scientist these days. As with just about any field out there, big data is a common component of research in the biological sciences. Biologists love our “-omics”: genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics; the list goes on and on. These areas of study all require handling large data sets, often times from next generation sequencing, which produces thousands of reads each time performed. Biologists also often use modeling, for instance to predict the structure of a protein based on its amino acid sequence, predict the function of that same protein, to model the interactions of microbes with each other and their environment, or as we have seen with the recent pandemic, disease modeling. Bioinformatics and Computational Biology have, over the years, become more and more important to all aspects of the science of Biology.
I was introducted to Bioinformatics during the time I worked in the lab at school. I began working on a project analyzing genomes and hunting for particular sets of genes associated with particular systems found in bacteria, with specific interest in gut microbiome members. I started learning Python and R to do this. It was love at first byte. I came to enjoy working with the data even more than I enjoyed laboratory benchwork. Now, recently graduated, I have made it my mission to increase my data knowledge and use that knowledge to immerse myself in a data career. I still have aspirations to obtain a graduate level education, but now I feel more inclined to get that education in a Computer Science or Data Science field. Thus far, I have greatly enjoyed my work in the field and I am excited for all that is still to come.