31–40 of 179 posts
I'd recommend starting reading about Google's AlphaFold, since this is currently considered state of the art in the field: https://deepmind.com/blog/alphafold/
Inside the company you can also push them to try and open source the tools. Unlikely that’ll work if they don’t do it already, however this skill set will eventually let you contribute more in the future. After some time on the job, start a personal open source project or start a company directed at some of the issues you saw.
It’s general advice and it’s the long game, but will likely help you have more impact.
The advice above may be more useful for engineers earlier in their career, but you can accomplish that in a handful of years.
This will sound harsh, but it isn’t meant to be. Scientists code better then you do science. This is simply a consequence Of a weeding out mechanism for those that have no coding skills. The only ppl who get away with no coding skills are important professor with grad students to do the coding. This isn’t to say that our skills are great, but a generic programmers (I.e. CS majors) science abilities are approximately…
This will sound harsh, but it isn’t meant to be. Scientists code better then you do science. This is simply a consequence Of a weeding out mechanism for those that have no coding skills. The only ppl who get away with no coding skills are important professor with grad students to do the coding. This isn’t to say that our skills are great, but a generic programmers (I.e. CS majors) science abilities are approximately…
I would say a cheap win for a coder would be to attack some domain where only rough research code exists and make it more reliable, scalable, better documented, interoperable, etc. a complete rewrite is probably required in many cases, but you have the working old version to compare against.
There may be the next Zuckerberg hiding in you. Imagine what would be possible if you could reach that level of wealth and use all that money to propel science forward. I’m not talking about some chickenshit foundation; real impact is made by committing all of your financial means to helping science. That’s how a real difference is made.
There’s lot of questions. How to organize it? How to encourage participation? How to maximize usefulness while at the same time minimizing volunteer effort? How to encourage discussion (suggesting changes for a better exp design) rather than manipulation (stealing the seed of a bad experiment to publish at your better funded lab)?
I don’t know how to do it, but I think if done right people would really like it.
Provide funding for permanent positions. I'm currently in the last few months of my first postdoc in condensed matter physics (think superconductors, quantum computers etc.) but will move into industry next year for lack of perspectives towards a permanent position in a reasonable place. As far as I can tell, my research so far was not substandard and the software I wrote has enabled quite a few projects which otherw…
Forget science: as an “army of one” you’re unlikely to make a contribution of sufficient magnitude that some needle might be moved in the right direction. Take advantage of the skills you do have: make money by doing what startup entrepreneurs do, then donate all proceeds to scientific research. There may be the next Zuckerberg hiding in you. Imagine what would be possible if you could reach that level of wealth and…