Ask HN: Non-tech professionals on HN?

I'm essentially in the business of thinking clearly about client problems and communicating that thinking as effectively as possible, which means that I gravitate toward communities that take pride in the same. Although this is a technically oriented forum, I find many of the discussions here to be intelligent and thought-provoking, especially when they have to do with philosophy, psychology, sociology, economics or business -- those topics that we all must be concerned with, whether we work in tech or not.

My PhD was in cancer-immunology. I was looking at the interaction between the immune system and lymphoma cancer cells. It was a particularly interesting area because the cancer cell and the reactive immune response were, once upon a time, the same cell. We used several high dimensional techniques to identify cells, including single cell sequencing, which can measure the production of up to 20'000 genes per cell on several thousand cells. I also used something call mass cytometry which binds around 40 antibodies to individual cells looking at what's on their surface. It was great stuff and I'm still working on some of my data from it (analysing it is still a bit of an unsolved problem!).

I learnt Go because I realised that I was using R without understanding programming. I loved using Go, it's a great imperative language, but maybe not that suited to run-once analyses of numbers (I know writing this someone will prove me wrong!). I did a bit of mathematical modelling in Julia too, and really enjoyed that. I'm actually a big fan of R - once I got my head round using it in a functional style, it's very elegant for my work.

If you wan to do a PhD in cancer research, probably worth contacting Professors to see if they're aware of any interesting projects and talking to the people supervising them. My advice is to do something you're genuinely interested in and have an adviser that you will be able to get along with even in times of acute stress! Good luck!