Okay, so truth be told, I’ve been considering in doing a PhD for some time, well I even know what I would like to do my research with, if I were to actually do a PhD. Well I’d like to study medicine a little, not to the point where I could confidently operate on a living being, but to the point where I can help contribute technologies to the medicinal field.
Whether it’s a big data application or its programing bio-technologies, such as prosthetic limbs or organs. I feel passionate about doing research towards such a cause, the idea of working with technology, but at the same time, making a huge difference, nothing seems as satisfying.
Provided I were to manage to get a really good undergrad grade, and maybe study a master’s degree too, could anyone suggest as to where I may begin doing homework in medicine. Of course, I’m no medicinal/bioscience expert, I don’t even plan on being either, I would just like to learn enough about the field of medicine to the point where I could provide support for doctors and people who carryout research for the field of medicine. Of course I’m using some common sense and learning what’s probably considered the medicinal basics, such as how organs function, and how they interact with each other.
Can anyone point me in the direction of some good learning sources or can anyone suggest a good point to start at?
I studied bio engineering as a part of my mechanical degree course and a friend of mine went on to do a phd in this field (anaylsing the long term effects of a specific spinal proceedure).
So he was able to do it through our college, but that's kinda the catch. Our college already had the equipment available and was involved with medical research.
Does your college/university have experience in this field? Remember you won't be doing a phd on your own. You will have to have a mentor with some experience and you will rely on your college to have the equipment and the connections in industry already.
So go speak with someone there. Otherwise you will have to start looking at other universities and you will need to go speak with them.
I know that my university does offer a couple of science degrees that are part technology/engineering and part medicene, my univesity offers shings from nano medicinal degrees to health data science degrees. Of course I'm going to look more into it all in my own time, but it's just an idea for now, I'm expecting to get a pretty good grade for my BSC in computer science. I was also considering in talking to a few members of my department, ask them what their research and work involves, etc.
Definitely go visit the engineering/tech departments and get talking to some of the lab technicians and the masters/phd students. Most the time they are the people who really know what the bleeding edge projects are.
As for giving you advice on sources of info, I'm at a loss. Although I get the feeling from your post that you are focusing more on interesting technology applications rather than any specific area of computer science (i.e. what you've studied). This isn't a bad thing (as the applications of all this stuff is what makes it intersting) but behind all these cool applicaitons is an underlying technology (i.e. machine learning, robotics, computer vision etc.) and you want to make sure you are really interested in that applicaiton's underlying techology. Otherwise you will not enjoy doing your phd. It will still be okay at the start when everything is new and you're in your reserach portion, but when it gets to the later stages and you really have to push yourself to finish, having a keen interest in what your actually doing (i.e. programming a machine learning application, as oppossed to making a medical applicaiton) will make the difference whether you get a good grade or even just passing.
So my advice would be to really look at the areas of computer science that you are interested in and researching how these lend themselves into a particular medical application. Tackle it from the side of things you're trained in rather than the applicaiton that results from a given field in computers. By all means still go the route your going (looking into cool applicaitons) as you still need to get a feel for what's possible, but defintely look at it from the side of what you're good at as well (i.e. what you enjoyed doing in your undergrad).
You're 100% correct there, and from doing a bit of homework, and what not, I think that nanomedicine will be my next step, I emailed the head of the department last night, just to check to see if I’d be a suitable applicant for the masters course. Turns out, they’re more than happy to accept computer science students, the only reason as to why I would’ve thought that they’d have said no is due to the fact that I have no/little medical education/background.
I think that if you didn’t enjoy your PhD, then you’re wasting a lot of time.
Right now, that is exactly what I’m doing, I’m trying to define ways where you could essentially program the likes of a human liver, in theory, allowing us to create prosthetic devices to help those that need such an application. It’s one hell of a long shot, and I’m fine with admitting, I may be a bit overly ambitious, but at the same time, where would humanity be without someone saying “I’m gonna fly to the moon someday”?
I tend to excel with the likes of HCI, due to the fact that I had a lecturer prior to university take me under his wing, he was a UI deign expert, and he taught me a lot, a lot of theories that may have never even entered my head. To say the least, due to the fact that I’ve learnt a bit of HCI beforehand, I feel that it has given me a slight advantage compared to a lot of other students. I also know that HCI links in fairly tightly with medicinal applications, which is also a good thing, as that’s mostly what I’d like to focus on.
So I'm not sure of your background, but there are multiple areas that sort of describe what you're interested in. If you're talking about data science coupled with medicine/biology then there's bio-informatics or genomics which is essentially biology as a big data problem, and there is plenty of research going on in these areas as you might imagine so plenty of scope for digging out a niche little area to do a PhD in.
Then there's the robotics stuff you've sort of touched on. One of the lecturers at my university has a lab that is half roboticists,and half biologists, where some people are working on robot swarms, and some are working on programmable nanoparticles for medical applications like cancer treatment.