Opportunities in bioinformatics once abounded for the self-taught and industrially minded, but employers are now turning towards the formally trained and academics. Myrna Watanabe reports. Francis Ouellette, director of the University of British Columbia (UBC) Bioinformatics Centre, calls his generation of computational biologists "the old guard". Ouellette quit his doctoral programme in developmental biology after dabbling in informatics turned him into "the lab computer expert". After stints managing the yeast-chromosome project and serving as GenBank coordinator for the US National Center for Biotechnology Information in Bethesda, Maryland, Ouellette moved in 1998 to UBC, where he is now a full professor ― but not in the discipline in which he originally trained.
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