50
votes
Are there any scientists on Tildes?
I knew a number of my science people are on, but who else is?
I'm a PhD Organic Chemist (2002, I'm old), and I run the new product R&D group at Sigma-Aldrich.
I knew a number of my science people are on, but who else is?
I'm a PhD Organic Chemist (2002, I'm old), and I run the new product R&D group at Sigma-Aldrich.
I'm a scientist! Kind of! I got my Ph.D. about a year ago, and now I write science software full time. Today all my experiments failed and all my cluster runs crashed; I blame my collaborators.
What are of science do you write software for? Computational chemistry/physics/engineering?
We have a couple of pretty cool software things going on (can't discuss openly of course) but one should go live later this year.
I do bioinformatics software mostly. We're always comparing our tools against the state of the art, and then frowning when they don't win and trying again with slightly different algorithms.
Greetings from an annotator who is hoping your algorithms will make my job less frustrating XD
I'm a registered nurse with a bachelors degree in science. Steady plodding toward a PhD in Nursing. It's touchy-feely science, but important. Mind you, I LOVE microbiology and physics, I just like people a little more. :)
Forgive my ignorance but I'm a physician and what exactly is a PhD in nursing? I don't mean to come off condescending but I guess I'm just curious what does a PhD of nursing do differently than an RN? Is it to move up in admisitration in an academic intuition (because academic institutions I've worked in do put a premium on degrees) or something else with research or what?
PhD in nursing is a nursing research degree. DNP (Doctor of Nursing Practice) is a clinical practice degree. Both can become nurse practitioners with the proper credentialing.
Registered Nurses have a pretty broad scope of practice but must almost exclusively be working under Physician orders (there are a few exceptions). Nurse practitioners can actually run their own practice and have prescribing credentials, though the focus tends to be on basic health care, general health and management of common ailments.
My goal is to become an APNP (Advanced Practice Nurse Prescriber). I have not decided what my field of study will be. I currently work in hospice and palliative care, but I'm not sure I want to spend the rest of my career here.
I know what an NP is. Most states still restrict NPs to function under MD orders. So do you want to be able to prescribe and run your own practice? If so why didn't you just go to med school and become an MD? I know many physicians that were RNs or CRNAs then went back to med school to get their degree.
NP's don't have to work under MD's in my state, though most of the NP's I know have close collaborations with many.
The short answer is that I didn't get my my nursing degree until I was 28 (associates) and completed my bachelors when I was in my early thirties. I also didn't have a very good understanding of what each profession does. The physicians and a few of the NP's I'm friends with have encouraged me to go to medical school. The mentor ship physicians receive in medical school alone is better than in nursing (on all levels). I think I would do medical school well if I went that route, but I'm 41 now and I think it might be getting a little late for that.
Eh I dunno. You'd definitely be the old one in the class and it would basically be 7-8 years but there were 40 year olds with us in residency and med school.
I do think if being a doctor is your goal you should go there proper route though. That's not to say I don't have the utmost respect for nurses but I know NPs and they get about 1/10th the training docs get in the same field time wise and I can only assume quality wise as well (but that is not subjective)
Another RN here chiming in…
The other major difference between a PhD in nursing and DNP is that PhDs can be PIs on research while a DNP cannot. Also, there’s a difference between NPs and PAs (who do actually have to get an MD signature on things I think?). I’m not an expert, but from my experience, while NPs are somewhat restricted in what they can do, they are not restricted to practicing “under” a doctor. There are clinics run and staffed entirely by NPs. They only have to have a doctor of record who agrees to be available (by phone, basically. They don’t even have to set foot in the building) in case of any questions.
Yes the NP training may be less time, but nursing experience counts for a lot. To suggest that becoming a nurse practitioner is just a less “proper” was of becoming a doctor is insulting. As in every field, there are nurses and physicians who excel and those whose performance is questionable. I’ve had hospitalists (MDs) look at patients in acute kidney failure (and still being followed by nephrology) and ask me why they hadn’t been discharged yet. I know experienced RNs who can talk to physicians and essentially tell them “I need orders for this,” because they’ve been around long enough to know exactly what needs to be done, and I know physicians who I wouldn’t trust to tie my shoes.
Many of my favorite physicians have been the ones who were nurses first. I even know one who was an NP before going to med school (around age 40) and she was hands down the best hospitalist I’ve ever worked with. While I don’t think it’s “too late” to become an MD at 41, I do recognize that there is a lot to consider and a lot of commitments and adjustments, financial and otherwise, and it might not be the most practical or possible in every situation.
I agree, nurses can make great Doctors when they go to medical school. The experience is invaluable. I know many docs that were an RN first who are fantastic
My point though, is that a lot of nurses /would/ be great doctors, and just because they haven't gone to medical school doesn't mean that you can insult an entire group of professionals by saying they're doing it wrong.
I'm not disagreeing with you that going to medical school would be great for a lot of people. As an RN I think my concern with nurse practitioners is not that the education is inherently lacking, but that there does seem to be a lot of variation in the quality of that education. So basically some of the schools are great and train great practitioners, and some of them not so much.
There is a lot to be said for what it really takes to be a nurse. I’m not saying you did this, but a lot of people like to romanticize nursing as a purely emotional endeavor, while doctors do the “real” thinking. And to a large extent, yes, nursing has a lot to do with empathy and emotions. But also 1. Culturally speaking, emotional labor is generally considered “feminine” and inherently less than the rational and 2. There is a lot of knowledge and constant analysis that goes into nursing. The combination of the emotional and rational is what makes nursing so uniquely challenging and important. So for example, as a nurse you have to know enough to help educate your patients about a new diagnosis, but you also sit with them as they work through the ramifications of what that means for their life, long after the doctor has left the room. You have to know when to hold medications, and when to call the doctor, (and sometimes when to argue with the doctor), while also recognizing that the patient is human and the doctor is human and for the most part we’re all just doing the best we can. Few people can walk that line really well.
What I’m asking you to do is to not just consider becoming a doctor a “step up” from nursing, which is what your response seems to suggest. Yes, in a lot of situations MDs have more in the way of information/ knowledge. But just because somebody doesn't go to medical school doesn't mean they weren't smart enough or didn't want to go all the way. Nursing is a practice unto itself and not everyone can do it. Ultimately we’re all on the same team.
The training is not comparable which is what bothers me and makes me think some people are just trying to do the easy route, otherwise they'd go to med school and more importantly residency which is where you really learn
Ultimately the role of an NP is not exactly the same as an MD. The article that you yourself linked states that NPs can do a lot of what MDs do. The remaining stuff that they can't do is why their practice is more restricted. We already established that nursing experience is super valuable, and that certain NP degrees are more thorough than others.
NPs aren't just people who were too lazy to become doctors, but again I shouldn't have to convince you that nursing isn't just an inferior form of medicine.
Best of luck to the person who originally posted about nursing PhD, whatever you decide to do.
You're putting a lot of words in my mouth. All I said was that if you're an np and you want to practice without doctor supervision, you should become a doctor and you shouldn't get a degree like a doctor of nurse practitioner so you can call yourself a doctor to people who don't understand the difference. If you're getting your PhD to do research that's great but I've met many who get it then just go back to clinicals and call themselves doctors to patients
Yet another physicist. Did my grad work at CERN trying to understand how the chromodynamics of a particle changes when it's forming. Which is a fancy way of saying I wrote a lot of terrible code for pattern recognition algorithms. Doing data science now
Hey fellow CERN alum! I was one of the generally loathed folk over in IT for a few years, though I'm originally a Life Science person.
Terrible code... from a CERN physicist, I'm SHOCKED :-D.
Quite. There should be a physical law that prevents physicists from ever designing code. Every time they try, a cosmic Stallman will appear to shout NO and hit them on the nose with a rolled up paper
Yep, that said I met Stallman (At CERN) and he smelled so bad it was hard to take much seriously. They he showed up with a weird metal halo and a cape and it all got even weirder...
Oh man! I would've loved to meet him :)
Good old days at the CERN! I was one of the main architects (for a while) of the Nordugrid ARC and related Nordic infra for EGEE and CERN experiments mostly for the ATLAS. I ate those terrible codes for breakfast at that time ;)
Hahahhahaha we undoubtedly know each other. :D Small world.
(at least it wasn't gLite you worked on :P )
Small world indeed! Yeh I operated gLite based cluster and cried a lot ;)
Hey, I'm ATLAS myself and used to hang out with some of the nordic people, so there's a chance we know each other. What years were you there? My gf at the time did GRID for CMS and I was so envious at how stable theirs was
Between 2000 and 2006. In the beginning everthing was really bad in all the experiments than it got a bit beter. I did for example not tust the Higgs results until 5 sigma beacuse I now how the sausage was made :)
That's before my time. I was there for the Higgs searches and that's exactly why we choose to publish only around 6 sigma
Of course there was D0 blowing at our neck, but luckily the Higgs was just beyond its reach.
Got pretty pissed the collaborations didn't get a Nobel for it (because no Nobel for collaborations) but then LIGO did
Did you ever go to the Finnish xmas parties? I've rarely been more drunk!
No. I knew better than to drink with a Finn :)
I did have one Finnish colleague and I have never seen a more sombre person in my life. We were at a conference once and sat through endless lunches together in which he never spoke. And I've never even seen him smile
Story time.
The first one fo these i went to, up at the top of the Meyrin site, there was like 40 people and as i walked in there was enough booze for about 300. Crates of beer. Crates of wine. Bottles of Vodka. A mulled wine that was about 60% neat spirits. I'd come direct from the office and not eaten much that day and i was worried. I figured they'd be some food so I'd go for that first. All i could find were a big tray of chocolates, and i thought, ah well, it'll do.
Popped one in my mouth, bit down..... full of Finlandia vodka.
Later saw the Head of IT so drink he couldn't stand vertically and kept slumping down the wall. Not sure how or when i got home.
Haha, that's hilarious! We used to get pretty wild at parties but never this :)
I did an internship at CERN while in undergrad! Seems to be a disproportionate amount of CERN folks here. I worked on CMS though.
Oh, you were a Summie? So was I. What year?
I'm not sure I qualify as a scientist but I am a Chemical & Biomolecular Engineer and work in R&D on a green energy and renewable process.
Close enough, the rest of the world would consider you a scientist.
I wonder what qualifies you as a scientist. I have written a Bachelor's thesis ( B. Sc in medical computer science, thesis in bio informatics) and I might publish an article about it.
Depends on how strict the person defining it wants to be. I don't think there's an official definition, but I think most scientists would say PhD equivalent work in a scientific field. Basically, doing a job which expands human understanding of some phenomena.
I'm a baby scientist! PhD student in computational chemistry.
I won't be impressed until you computational guys can predict the yields and side products of reactions in less time than it takes me to run the reaction!
The yield prediction could be an interesting ML problem using a graph-based techniques to similar to [this] (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jpclett.5b00831).
Hah, the computational organic folks wish!
I do theoretical chemical spectroscopy and the field regularly predicts spectra that are confirmed once the engineers manage to make a big enough laser ;-)
I'm definitely not one as is, but I'm studying for a BS in Computer Science. If I stay in academia after, would that make me a scientist? Whether I am or not though, I definitely have a lot of respect for it as a field. What is being the head of R&D like?
Being in charge of a group is a lot of headaches, and not nearly as much glory as you might think. It's kind of like being a mod on reddit, take away the title and it's kind of a shitty job.
I like having a greater voice in the strategic direction of the company, and I like solving problems for customers and making cool chemical available for other chemists.
I'm a scientist-minder. Undergrad life science degree, realised i was not cut out to do a PhD< so went into the weird tangent of communications/policy/management around research. Spent my career thus far supporting scientists, and helping them do what they do best, without having them rub up against the 'real' world too harshly.
Mind if I ask how you managed to get into your current career? I'm guessing your path was pretty specific to you, but I'm in a similar place as you were (bio degree, not up for a PhD now or possibly ever). I'd like to find a way to be science-adjacent, and communication/policy was an interest of mine the few times we touched on it during my degree.
I took an MSc in Science Communication. There are a few about. The I managed to tumble into EU-funded research, which is project based and always needs peopel to do the non-science parts, but needs to be peopel that understand science.
Cool! I was looking into masters a while back and found a couple; I'd need something part time and potentially online, and the program at Edinburgh looked promising. I don't think I'm quite ready to commit to more education since I graduated less than a month ago, but it's nice to know that there are jobs out there.
I failed my computer science PhD qualifiers. Made some bad strategic decisions trying to save time getting through the program. Getting out of school I got a nice R&D job though so I kinda like to imagine I'm a scientist. :)
Hoping to get back to the PhD sometime for sure. If anyone reading this is just now getting to that for the first time, take it from me: take your time getting into it and deciding what you want to research. Things like qualifying exams (if your institution requires them) may rightly seem like annoying obstacles, and you may feel like you're bleeding time and money preparing adequately for them, but they stand in the way of something important and should not be taken lightly in the slightest.
Getting a PhD is like a driver's license, it's only a big deal if you don't have one, and once you do it's meh.
Unless there is absolutely something that you absolutely must do in your life that you absolutely must have a PhD for, I would suggest skipping it, especially in computer science.
Oh god, this is so true. I'm stealing this to tell the next person who makes googly eyes at me for being a PhD student.
I also failed my PhD qualifiers and it was the best thing to happen to me. Finished with a Masters and got off the bench and into the commercialization end of things.
I have a degree in Technology! you have a degree in baloney
I am not a certified scientist but I definitely have it in my heart, my first experiment was testing whether the tooth fairy was my parents or not, when I lost a tooth I didn't tell my parents but I put it under my pillow for 3 nights when it did not come, then I told my parents, low and behold it was gone and in its place 50 cents. I repeated this experiment a few times before I revealed my findings to my parents. Which marked the last time I got money from the tooth fairy, really shot myself in the foot there.
I honestly went to school thinking I was going to become a computer scientist, problem was I chose DeVry, and in my second year I took a break for a semester, being burnt out, when I came back I found they had enrolled me in the recently accredited, in Canada, Bachelor of Technology in Computer Information Systems program. They assured it me is was the equivalent to a B.Sc. in CS that I was originally enrolled in (the last year was through Phoenix University, man that should have been a flag right?)
About a year after I graduated, the DeVry contacted me to say they recently got accreditation in Canada for the Bachelor of Science in Computer Science degree and if I wanted it all I had to do was attend one more semester with them. I was so done with them at this point I told them to go pound sand, and I joined the working force instead of entertaining moving on with my academic aspirations.
I now work with some great scientists and mathematicians on medical imaging software. We're using ML to help detect cancers, segment the heart, and more.
Once you get a job, no one cares what your degree is in. I have trouble telling who has a BS and who has a PhD at work.
Getting your first job will be the hard part, though. My university has gotten rid of most BA CS concentrations because employers assume BA = bad and consistently pass over students because it's not a BS.
I fall firmly on the side of industry shill in the scientist/engineer debate. I work for a major automotive OEM in their hybrid/electric vehicle department doing a combination of software development, analytics and testing.
I still want to go to grad school, but I currently don't have the time.
I just finished my bachelors in biology, so I guess I'm a potential scientist? Not sure where I'm going from here; I'm working on sorting out my health, but unless it improves significantly I'm not sure I will be able to manage something like grad school (and being ill during undergrad means my application would be less impressive than many).
Uh... that was much more of a downer than I meant it to be! I'm interested in genetics, evolution, and possibly bioinformatics. I didn't get to explore bioinformatics as much as I wanted in school, so I've been looking at various resources and considering taking some Coursera online courses. I'm also working on starting a blog where I try out citizen science projects and write about my experiences. It would be cool to find a place in science communication, but it seems like a lot of folks in that area either come over from journalism or have PhDs in their field.
My experience of bioinformatics as applied in the real world thus far has been 1) tedium 2) frustration 3) only vague and fleeting bits of satisfaction.
I much prefer the lab -.-
Ooph, tedium and frustration? Oh dear. :D
To be honest, my experience with bioinformatics and lab work are both so minimal, I can't say which I'd prefer (or if I'd dislike both). My health limitations and lack of experience are making it hard to figure out if I can somehow stay in science.
What sort of work do you do in the lab? (I see you mention annotating above, so I'm guessing something in genetics?)
If health concerns are an issue, what I do is actually really convenient for that. I get to sit on the computer at home and put my own hours in. If I want to work at 2 a.m. nothing stops me from doing so. If I don't feel well at noon, I can always make up that time later at my convenience.
Gene annotation uses bioinformatics, molecular concepts, and some basic genetics concepts (at least at my level). Imagine you just sequenced an organism's DNA. You have a file of raw data that's just A-T-C-Gs in some order. None of that is going to make any sense to you, or can be of any substantive use, until someone goes through that file and locates what genes are where. Does this organism even have ____ gene? How different in sequence is it to its closest relative's same gene? How many copies of that gene exist in said organism? Stuff like that.
Algorithms save a ridiculous amount of time in this, which is a reason I stopped to say hello to that one person in the thread above c:
How'd you get into this area (and what level of education did you need), if you don't mind my asking? You're right that something done mostly (or entirely) on a computer with the possibility to work from home would definitely help with some of the current barriers I'm facing due to my health.
What you do sounds cool; I'm a little familiar with gene annotation from a course that I took on sequencing, microbiomes, and metagenomics, but most of what we did was simply explore existing tools like RAST and NCBI annotation.
Since my school sits in the middle of an area that is deeply entrenched in citrus-greening research, the school would be missing out on a chance to provide students with quality senior-research-project material while also providing cheap labor to the cause of curing greening. A professor at this college is part of a grant to provide quality annotation for a recently sequenced vector of the disease. He recruits students who are entering or completing a B.S. in Biology program, regardless of whether they've taken bioinformatics yet...because "senior annotators" train the newbies on everything anyway (and our bioinformatics class is only useful for like...learning terminology, at best lol). But that's just this school's situation.
Gene annotation and bioinformatics is kind of the next bubble I see. I assume that any college serious about STEM is going to have something similar to what I'm describing. There's an endless amount of organisms being sequenced and that will need to be manually annotated. The work never ends until we create an algorithm so good it doesn't need to be double-checked by humans.
Anyway! A B.S. in Biology is all I needed to get my foot into the world of annotation (and not even that because I started before I finished my degree). It's part-time work and pays almost nothing where I'm at, but it's experience. And, of course, there's always ways to climb the ladder.
Thanks for such a detailed answer! Weird coincidence, but I think we looked at the sequence of Candidatus liberibacter at one point in my sequencing class and it was the subject of research at my uni, so sounds like we may have gone to school in the same area.
My university had a bioinformatics minor, but I was only able to take a couple classes from it and didn't do any undergrad research. Since I've graduated, it sounds a bit like I'd have to get a masters to get any hands-on experience similar to what you've had. It's a shame I didn't have the energy to take advantage of that sort of thing in my bachelor's, but... that's life~
Interesting!
Well, sounds like you'd be in the right geographical location to jump into that kind of thing. It's definitely an option.
Undergrad degrees in Math and Physics here. Currently working as an engineer, likely going back to school for a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering (possibly focused on signal processing).
I'm a physicist at fairly large university. I was an early mod for askscience as well.
I do water chemistry for boiler systems and chillers, am I a scientist? I even have a nice chemisty set with titration stands and a pH meter :P
For real though I'm planning to go back to college with my GI Bill to become a scientist, one day...
I'll be enrolling in a Psych PhD program next year. so I'll get back to you in maybe a decade :(
A decade? Quite optimistic aren't you! :-p
Nooooooo don't do that to me! :(
I have a bachelors in science (earth science!), but I never wanted a higher-level degree and I recently accepted a job in a decidedly non-science field so uh... maybe that ship has sailed.
That said, I do have the science background, and I have a great respect for scientists. :)
Medical Image Processing PhD here! Working on algorithms to improve precision and reduce the cost of clinical trials.
Got my PhD in Computational Bio ~18 months ago, though now working in industry doing ML research!
Not quite a scientist, but have been in and around the healthcare space for 5 years.
Now I run a company I founded focused on encouraging men to freeze their sperm!
Please tell me the company has a hilariously bad pun as a name....
'Come for the product, stay for the good feels'
I'm in an early-stage pharmaceutical company that was spun out of my old lab. MSc in Experimental Oncology
Bachelor's degree in biology, just a couple credits short of a double major in chemistry. Worked professionally as a microbiologist then later as a molecular biologist running microarray analyses (I was in charge of the core lab at a large teaching/research hospital). There have been some career changes and more school since then, but yeah.
I'm a PhD student in digital humanities. Not sure if 'proper' scientist but let me have this :D
I'm in the last year of my physics PhD doing ultrafast spectroscopy on photosynthetic proteins. When I'm done I'm going into software development!
Everyone where I am still says Aldrich! We say MilliporeSigma, but it doesn't feel real, especially since the real name of the company is Merck KgaA.
Yes, physicist here. I founded many science-oriented companies in computer and data science, chemoinformatics, economics, finance. One of them is Mcule which might be interesting for you.
I have a degree in Biology/Neuroscience but fell off the boat and work in Supply Chain Logistics right now. I also completed an MBA for shits and giggles.
I'm thinking of a change in career and could use some advice. What can I do in the sciences or adjacent that is analytical but doesn't require much lab experience? I'm kind of at a loss. My job currently consists of a lot of Excel manipulation and Access queries of composite tables, which I like but would love to have more interesting context.
Just got my PhD in Microbiology this spring. I've trended toward informatics for a while, and my post doc is basically "establish cool computer stuff in this lab," so I've got my work cut out for me...
Cognitive scientist.
If my B.S. in Computer Science counts, then sure. I don't exactly engage in traditional scientific work, but my problem-solving process when developing software roughly aligns with the scientific method and I do a lot of rigorous research and theoretical validation of my proposed implementations before I start writing any code, so maybe?
I'm a scientist at heart and somewhat in practice, but I'm not a scientist professionally. Decide what you will with that, I guess :)
I'm a couple years away from a PhD in organic chemistry (:
If you need any advice let me know.
Biology (BS) and soil and water science (MS), now a working professional in my field.
Not a scientist (still working on my associates degree infact) but I just want all the science people here to know that I appreciate you and all the work you do.
Hopefully this thread isn't too old to post - was going to ask something similar...
I'm less than a year away from finishing my PhD in biochemistry and mass spectrometry. Specifically in structural biology and structural proteomics. I order from Sigma all the time! ;)
Curious if anyone else is in a similar field. If so, hit me up.
Neat!
I'm an MD, Masters in BioE and B.S. in ChemE with a focus on nanoscale sensor design and bioelectronics.
I design medical devices for a living :)
I have a degree in molecular biology and work in a core DNA sequencing lab. I'm not directly involved in research, but rather provide services for other academics. I'm so glad there are other scientists here! :)
MSc in genetics. Worked in various labs for the best part of a decade and now just starting my PhD alongside my current job as an RA in a leukemia research lab. Wish me luck!