Research Field Guide
How to Get a Bioinformatics Research Position
To get a Bioinformatics research position, find professors who are actively publishing in Bioinformatics, read what they actually work on, and email one of them a short, specific note. Much of the work is computational, so you can offer to contribute remotely.
Below are 12 professors publishing in Bioinformatics right now, what each is working on, and how to reach out. Every name and topic is pulled from real, recent publication data, not a generic list.
Bioinformatics professors who are actively publishing
| Professor | Institution | Recent research focus |
|---|---|---|
| Kevin W. Eliceiri | University of Wisconsin System | Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Biomedical Research |
| Robert Tibshirani | Stanford University | Gene expression and cancer classification |
| Mark Gerstein | Yale University | Bioinformatics and Genomic Networks |
| Gordon K. Smyth | The University of Melbourne | Gene expression and cancer classification |
| Wolfgang Huber | European Molecular Biology Organization | Gene expression and cancer classification |
| Jill P. Mesirov | University of California San Diego | Gene expression and cancer classification |
| Chris Sander | Broad Institute | Bioinformatics and Genomic Networks |
| Albert-Ĺaszló Barabási | Brigham and Women's Hospital | Bioinformatics and Genomic Networks |
| Michael Boehnke | University of Michigan | Bioinformatics and Genomic Networks |
| John N. Weinstein | The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center | Gene expression and cancer classification |
| Patrick O. Brown | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Gene expression and cancer classification |
| David Botstein | San Francisco VA Medical Center | Gene expression and cancer classification |
Sourced from OpenAlex publication records. Click a name to see their full profile and recent papers.
What Bioinformatics research involves
Bioinformatics turns biological data, especially DNA, RNA, and protein sequences, into answers. The active work you will see includes gene-expression analysis and cancer classification, building and querying genomic networks, and the methods and databases that the whole field of genomics depends on. The work is remote-friendly by nature: it runs on code, public datasets, and compute clusters rather than a wet bench. That makes it one of the more accessible fields for a student to join, because a professor can hand you sequencing data and a question without you setting foot in a lab. Knowing the underlying biology is what separates good analysis from output you cannot interpret.
How to email a Bioinformatics professor
Bioinformatics professors get plenty of vague emails, so be concrete about the data and tools you can handle. Offer to analyze a dataset remotely, reproduce a figure, or run a standard pipeline (alignment, differential expression, variant calling) on data they work with. Name your stack: Python or R, Bioconductor, Nextflow or Snakemake, and any genomics coursework. Reference one recent paper, ideally on gene expression or a genomic-network method, and ask a question that shows you understood the analysis. Keep the first ask small and verifiable, like one clean analysis, rather than asking for a long-term role up front.
Bioinformatics overlaps with nearby fields. If you are casting a wider net, look at research positions in Computational Biology, Genetics, Molecular Biology, and Machine Learning.