| @deskamess - I believe a Master's is the minimum buy-in, and Ph.D. is preferred. My Ph.D. area is quite narrowly in theoretical chemical physics, but was all heavy computation and focused on quantum and classical dynamics. The areas of study are going to be computational chemistry, pharmaceutical chemistry, cheminformatics, or something closely related to those. Whether you work in a lab or in front of a computer depends on what you study and whose lab you study it in. You can't go wrong with a Ph.D. from UCSF, I can tell you that (I was a postdoc there), so browse the faculty pages. Have a look at some of the open positions at, say, Roche/Genentech. There are some great open source resources and some industry-dominant ones with which you'll be expected to have some experience in (Schrodinger's software is one of them). Domain knowledge, of course. QSAR/ADME and similar acronyms. Docking, free energy perturbation, bioinformatics. Python/R/SQL. AI/ML is of course hot in pharma but not necessarily useful for all situations - I happen to not be much of an AI/ML guy and won't be penalized for that, which I cannot say about almost every job I've had or applied for. What got my foot in the door with drug design was postdoctoral work on molecular dynamics simulations of large systems that are physiologically relevant - motor proteins - and I was teamed-up with experimentalists who were studying the same systems. More than happy to share more, my contact info is in my profile. |
Wish you success in your efforts to get back into the industry.