4 ms·

Wow, how vain do you have to be to call yourself a quantitative biologist. It’s called a computational biologist.

• bigbillheck 5y ago
  Tell it to the arxiv: https://arxiv.org/archive/q-bio https://arxiv.org/archive/q-bio
• asdff 5y ago
  some people in this field work more theoretically and never do any computing themselves.
• mattkrause 5y ago
  In my experience, they're similar but have slightly different shades of meaning. To me, computational biology and bioinformatics strongly suggest that you are working on empirical data (usually genomic) from specific experiments or databases while using computationally-intensive tools (e.g., running on a cluster). You care, by necessity, about batch and lane effects. Quantitive biology puts more emphasis on the math and concepts. For example, one might work with a toy model of the cell cycle, action potential generation, or predator-prey dynamics. The goal might be to qualitatively characterize different types of behaviors (e.g., find bifurcations), using parameters roughly derived from the literature, rather than to precisely analyze one data set. They might use `ode45`, but the computation probably runs on one desktop. Obviously, there's lots of potential overlap and the same person might do a bit of both. However, I don't think the choice of field name has anything to do with hubris.
• j7ake 5y ago
  Quantitative is more general than computational. For example people who develop new microscopy techniques to quantify biological measurements at new resolutions or precision can also be called “quantitative biology”.