Biomedical Informatics

[PFitz]

Anyone apply for biomedical informatics this year?

What is the value of a Masters in this field?

Edited March 8, 2010 by PFitz

[qqq]

Anyone apply for biomedical informatics this year?

What is the value of a Masters in this field?

Anyone knows? I would like to ask this question as well.

[james2012new]

Me too!!

[thej-hizzle]

I'm currently in the application cycle for Biomedical Informatics PhD programs. As far as this field is concerned, it's a pretty new field from what I've gathered and should grow pretty quickly given the current tendencies to digitize health and patient data. There aren't that many programs that study biomedical informatics or translational informatics that I am aware of, but the all of the current programs stem from schools with strong bioinformatics and computational biology programs. You'll find most of these programs attached to schools with large hospitals because that's probably where most of the generated data in the field will come from at first. There are some huge challenges and obstacles in this field that deal both with ethics as well as logistics, so it could be interesting to see how those limit the growth of the field, but I think all the usual hotspots for entrepreneurship (Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, Houston/Dallas) are rapidly catching onto this trend in parallel with computational biology. At least that's why I'm applying!

[thenerdypengwin]

It has huge value! NPR recently ran a story on the new field. The problem is that it's so new, it's hard to delve into it. On the bright side, it's in development. So, if you like shaping a field, this is definitely for you. The PhDs currently in this field have experience from other fields and are new to working on this project. Unlike other diciplines, it's tough to find the right people to learn from and work with.

If you have experience in research, the data in informatics is even more messy than your typical sciences. So, you can't be a perfectionist in this field. Then again, if you like organizing... this field could use you.