Employment Prospects
There is enormous demand from industry for trained professionals in Bioinformatics. The pharmaceutical industry, agrobusiness, and biotechnology companies often raid academia for people with the appropriate interdisciplinary skills. There is also a great need for academic faculty who have broad, interdisciplinary training, because much of the success of the next generation of undergraduate and graduate students will depend on their ability to master materials in several disciplines. Competition for people skilled in bioinformatics is so intense that salary offers are being driven sky-high and there is concern that the universities--few of which are training students in the field--are rapidly being depleted of the best researchers.

A report from the Working Group of Biomedical Computing of the NIH recognized the shortage of biologists with appropriate computing expertise and called for strong NIH support of cross-disciplinary education and training.