| There’s a ton of bio specific domain knowledge you’d need to pick up. I haven’t met too many self taught comp bio people I’d imagine it’s the same as the number of self taught computational mechanics people. From my limited experience (this could def not generalize) the two fields are very different in industry. Comp mech tends to be very design or analysis oriented and hence project management heavy. Generally you already have a product and are trying to refine it in some way. There’s also usually commercially available tools to do advanced FEA. For the most part people aren’t writing their own programs anymore. Whereas comp bio tends to be more like data science applied to bio so it’s more of a software offshoot where projects feel more like full product development cycles where in some cases people produce software along with a final product. So you also need great coding skills. Finally most comp bio people have phds. I don’t know if it’s a requirement for a job but that’s what I have seen. This may be a barrier. To jump straight in could be very hard. Tho there may be other paths for example bioinformatics to learn domain and software then jump into comp bio once you have a base. There’s also the going back to school option to pick up domain knowledge + credential but I’m generally against it just because of opportunity cost. Anyway take all this with a grain of salt cause my experience/ what I’ve seen may be way off. Finally def check out some free comp bio classes. I think Stanford and Berkeley have freely available online materials. |
Could be interesting to look at the interface between quantum and classical chemistry… …And look at the interface between molecular dynamics and continuum FEM.