My ds is interested in bioinformatics. He would like to go to a liberal arts college where he would have more flexibility to take classes in different majors. But he wants to have the opportunity to do bioinformatics research as an undergrad with the idea of pursuing graduate school if he maintains that interest. He was told at some other LACs that it would be hard to do that there. I see that University of Puget Sound has some bioinformatics research & one professor in that area. Does anyone know of others?
You can do a College Board search on that major.
Thank you. There are a few LACs that have a bioinformatics major or concentration & so have research in that area. Hoping to broaden the search to identify other LAC’s that have bioinformatics research even if they don’t have the major. I have been looking through the CS/bio dept sites for individual schools, but thought I’d throw it out to CC posters as well.
Hamilton appears to be a good choice for bioinformatics:
Bioinformatics at Hamilton - Hamilton College
http://www.hamilton.edu/news/story/bioinformatics-at-hamilton
Bioinformatics is my daughter’s area of interest as well. We recently visited Hamilton — LOVED the school!
I think this gives a better overview of the program at Hamilton:
http://academics.hamilton.edu/biology/home/bioinformatics.html
At Wesleyan, there are actually two recommended pathways for students to satisfy the requirements for a Certificate in Informatics and Modeling. One is through intensive research in genomics:
http://www.wesleyan.edu/imcp/igs_courses_reqs.html
The other is through intensive work in computational science:
http://www.wesleyan.edu/imcp/csm_courses_reqs.html
Looking specifically for bioinformatics might be too narrow. In undergrad, the exact type of research you do isn’t as important as the skills that you get from doing that research. So I’d encourage him to look for professors doing all kinds of adjacent/related research - computational biology, computer science, statistics, math, biomedical engineering, etc.