What Bioinformatics is Bioinformatics is an area of computer science that utilizes technology to organize biological information. Through the use of computers scientists are able to process the mountains upon mountains of data that often come with bilogical research. Bioinformatics is especially useful where something like genes are being studied. Instead of having to go through by hand and fish out all of the important data, people in the bioinformatics field can develop algorithms to do this work for them. Due to recent developments, such as the mapping of the human genome, this is an expanding field that offers many opportunities to those entering the job market. Types of Jobs in Bioinformatics Computer Science Emphasis: Computer scientists know how computers work and how to program them to perform tasks and provide services. They study hardware and software. They conduct research, design computers and discover and use principles of applying computers. They have a high level of theoretical expertise to apply complex problems and innovative ideas for the application or creation of new technology. In industry, they work in areas such as applying theory, developing specialized languages or designing programming tools, knowledge-based systems or computer simulations. System analysts define problems and design their solutions using computers. This process includes planning and developing new computer systems or devising ways to apply existing systems to operations still completed manually or by some less efficient method. Much of their time is devoted to converting goals into separate programmable procedures. They use structured analysis, data modeling, information engineering, and mathematical model building. This may also involve computer networking to allow access by various users. Managment Information Systems Emphasis: The basic task of the information systems specialist is to act as an intermediary between the persons in an organization who have information needs, such as record keeping, sales, production or planning, and the computer programmers who write the solutions to these problems. The information analyst knows the business functions (accounting, marketing, finance, operations, strategic planning) as well as the computer programming and the computer programs available for solving particular problems. This person interviews the potential user, finds out the goals of the organization, determines the information needs and tools required to support these goals, and helps to design computerized systems to support these goals. Then the analyst may review the solutions and user needs with the programmers. Finally, the analyst may participate in the programming, implementation, and testing of these newly designed systems.