The MSc in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology will train graduates to meet computational research demands of bioscience in universities, research institutes, and industry.
The MSc programme will train participants to an advanced level in bioinformatics theory and applciations. Graduates of the programme will:
Graduates of this MSc programme will have a unique set of skills that will make them very attractive to employers. Graduates will have a variety of career options including working in a research group in a university or research institute, industrial research, or pursuing a PhD in bioinformatics.
Most research institutes and universities have bioinformatics research groups which employ bioinformaticians, while many 'wet biology' research groups in universities and research institutes also employ bioinformatians to help with data analyses and bioinformatics problems relating to their work.
Industries that employ bioinformaticians include the pharmaceutical industry, agricultural companies, and biotechnology companies.
Biology graduates may alternatively wish to return to 'wet lab' biology, either research or industry, after taking this MSc course. This MSc will provide extremely useful bioinformatics skills to such a lab biologist.
Our course has now been running since October 2009, and we have had three classes graduate from the course. The class currently doing the course is our fourth intake of students.
We are very proud of all our graduates. Of those we have managed to keep in touch with, four are working in UCC, one in Trinity College Dublin, five in Teagasc, one in the computing multinational in Ireland, and one in the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study.
Bioinformatics as a career has been featured in the career sections of the journals Nature and Science, for example, see these articles covering jobs in bioinformatics in academia (including systems biology, genomics, molecular evolution research) and industry (including the pharmaceutical industry):
There is a vibrant job market for bioinformaticians in universities, research institutes, and industry worldwide. The growing importance to modern biology of bioinformatic analysis of large data sets from high-throughput studies means that there is considerable demand for trained bioinformatians worldwide. For example, approximately 5-7% of all science jobs currently advertised (early 2012, with some variation from month-to-month) on the careers websites for the journals Nature and Science are for people with bioinformatics expertise. The increasing demand for bioinformatians is evidenced by the growing number of bioinformatics positions being advertised on the website www.bioinformatics.org : 144 in 2004, 275 in 2005, 351 in 2006, 498 in 2007, and 449 so far in 2008 (as of mid-December 2008).
Websites advertising jobs for bioinformaticians include:
As well as universities, many bioinformaticians are employed in research institutes, such as EMBL (Cambridge, UK and Heidelberg, http://www.embl.de), the Sanger Institute (Cambridge, UK, http://www.sanger.ac.uk), the J. Craig Venter Institute (San Diego and Rockville, http://www.jcvi.org), and NCBI (Maryland, US, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) among others.
Within Ireland, there are at least 15 bioinformatics research labs in universities (listed at the VIBE website), while many other 'wet' groups in universities also employ bioinformaticians.
Salaries for bioinformaticians vary from country to country, and between academia and industry, and with the level of experience of the applicant, but are on par with other scientific jobs. Prospective students can gain an idea of the salaries for bioinformaticians by browsing the jobs advertised at the websites listed above.
For questions relating to this course, please contact Dr. Marcus Claesson at m.claesson@ucc.ie.
