The bit about the PhD in microbiology caught my eye here--to people getting bored with "blub" programming: perhaps look into a field like bioinformatics, meteor

The bit about the PhD in microbiology caught my eye here--to people getting bored with "blub" programming: perhaps look into a field like bioinformatics, meteorology, and so on. You'd be working on difficult, "technical" things, but you'd be able to leverage your existing skills and simultaneously assist with the (inevitable?) computational aspects of that particular research.