The outlook is different in industry, he says. That's what I'm seeing now. Both industry and academia have reason to hire trained bioinformatics professionals, he adds. The genome sequencing projects are creating incredible amounts of sequential data. . . . Because of that, people in academia who are developing this data need ways to manage it and pick out the pearls.
Indications are that the tide is turning in academia.
For example, in addition to opening its Center for Bioinformatics, Penn uses a National Science Foundation research-training grant for doctoral and postdoctoral students in computational biology. This fall, it will offer what school officials call the first master's program in bioinformatics, as well as an undergraduate degree in the field. The programs are interdisciplinary, drawing on faculty members in the university's schools of medicine, arts and sciences, and engineering and applied sciences. It seems clear that new training programs will develop, and most involved feel the sky's the limit. That seems to help.