What is a bioinformatician?

Bioinformatician is a broad term, there isn’t one type of bioinformatician.

A bioinformatician will usually have knowledge of a specific biological domain, such as metabolomics, genomics or proteomics, as well as informatics skills, including programming and statistical analysis.

Bioinformaticians usually have a degree in a scientific or computational subject and either a postgraduate qualification in bioinformatics or significant experience in bioinformatics, or both.

Here’s some examples of what bioinformaticians spend their time doing:

• collaborating with research scientists
• consulting on many different stages of data collection and analysis, including data management and visualisation
• advising on experiment design
• data processing and statistical analysis
• development of bespoke analysis pipelines
• and many other tasks…

Learn more about the role and skills of a bioinformatician in these slides from Lee Larcombe, APEXOMIC.

Continue on to the next page, where we will think about bioinformatics as a science.