Also called: Public Health Bioinformatician, Genomic Epidemiologist
Reads the DNA of germs from sick patients to track outbreaks, spot new variants and find where food poisoning came from.
Pulls the night's sequencing results from the state public health lab, runs a pipeline that assembles each Salmonella genome, and compares them with national databases. Two samples from different counties match almost perfectly, so you alert the epidemiologists that they may share a source.
Estimate; government labs pay less than private companies.
Approximate: anchored on Bureau of Labor Statistics data for a broader job group.
Master's degree, about 6 years after high school. Bachelor's in biology or computer science; many have a master's in bioinformatics or public health.
Ways in: 4-year college, Graduate school. Training cost: $60k – $150k.
Majors to look at: Bioinformatics, Microbiology, Computer Science, Public Health.
Growing faster than average. Public health labs expanded genomic surveillance after COVID.
Medium risk for 10 years. AI writes code and flags patterns faster, but deciding if a cluster is a real outbreak stays human.
Classes: Biology, Computer science, Statistics, Chemistry.
Career Universe is an early version. Pay, training and AI-risk figures are estimates to start your own research, not verified facts. The research was written with AI research assistants, checked by validation scripts and spot-checked by hand. Check anything important with schools, employers and official sources. How the numbers work.