Bioinformatics/Computational Biology PhD - UCSC,Duke or UNC?

busterbluth
Thu, 31 Mar 2011 15:16:12 +0000

I am also a computational bio person so I’ll pass along my thoughts. I also looked into UCSC but not the other two schools. I was unable to attend the visit day at UCSC, so my impressions are all based on word of mouth and my own perusal of UCSC faculty web pages.

In my opinion, I wouldn’t be too concerned about the “name brand” status of UCSC. As you mention, UCSC is very well regarded among the bioinformatics community and I think most people would recognize it as among the top ten places to study bioinformatics in the country. Your point about it being a smaller group is a good point, and I can imagine that getting into David Haussler’s lab might be non-trivial since he’s pretty famous. However, they have several other people that I was very interested in working with (such as Ed Green, Josh Stuart, Kevin Karplus and others). Without knowing your exact interest area (and without knowing anything about the other faculty beyond the material on their web pages), my guess is that you would have lots of opportunities to do interesting and high impact work at UCSC. As I’m sure you know, your publication record and recommendations coming out of grad school will be more important than the name of the university anyway. Publishing 5 good papers at UCSC will outshine a lousy publication record at MIT any day.

I know less about Duke and UNC, but I don’t really think you can go wrong with your choices. They’re all great schools.

Congratulations on your admissions and good luck with your decision!