What’s out there for someone with my talent, interests, and background?

Emerging Fields to Consider

Bioinformatics
A career in bioinformatics (computational biology) can include a wide range of biological fields from genomics to neuroscience and anywhere in between. For example, mapping and understanding the human genome relies on the use of sophisticated mathematical and computational tools. Although human and other genome projects are essentially complete, there are numerous others still left to sequence. Other research challenges include understanding how genes interact, how they are switched on or off, and how they differ from one individual to another.

Research in neuroscience ranges from the operation of single neurons to the dynamics of small circuits and the cooperative action of whole populations of cells. Current and future work will involve mathematics and computational research in neurological processes such as vision, learning, and decision-making, as well as in emerging treatments for neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.

There is a great need for newer and better mathematical and computational tools to make research quicker and cheaper, resulting in the creation of new career opportunities in technology, medicine, and drug development and design.

Data Mining
Data mining is a broad mathematical area with many applications. It involves the discovery of patterns and previously unknown information in large data sets. Emerging career opportunities can be found in applications of data mining in fields such as security, forensics, e-commerce, bioinformatics and genomics, astrophysics, medicine, and chemical and electric power engineering.

Materials Science
Materials science is the study of the properties, processing, and production of a broad range of existing and new materials, including metallic alloys, composites, liquid crystals, biological materials, and thin films. The rational design and analysis of materials depends on mathematical models and computational tools. Career opportunities abound in science, manufacturing, and materials design for applications in fields such as aerospace, engineering, electronics, biology, and nanotechnology.

Computer Animation and Digital Imaging
To get an idea of what this field entails, consider the following description from the Fields Institute in Toronto: “Computer animation is an eclectic science that uniquely combines mathematics, computer science, fine art, classical animation, physics, biomechanics, and anatomy, to name but a few fields. Algorithms for computer animation rely heavily on techniques from scientific computation, statistics, signal processing, linear algebra, control theory, and computational geometry.” With a diverse and exciting set of applications in areas such as medical diagnostics, entertainment (film, television, and video games), and fine arts (dancing, sculpture, painting), there are many avenues and career opportunities to explore.

Finance and Economics
Financial mathematics is the development of mathematical tools and computational models used in the financial industry. As new quantitative techniques have transformed the financial industry, banks, insurance companies, investment and securities firms, energy companies and utilities, multinationals, government regulatory institutions, and other industries have come to rely on applied mathematics and computational science. Sophisticated math models and the computational methods and skills needed to implement them are used to support investment decisions, to develop and price new securities, to manage risk, and for portfolio selection, management, and optimization. For example, modern hedge funds depend on these sophisticated techniques as do pricing of bonds and commodity futures.

Ecology, Epidemiology, and Environmental Issues
Professionals in these fields might look at populations and their interactions and model them as systems of differential equations that model diseases in human populations (i.e. the spread of infection under various immunization protocols). Other applications in these fields include the management of ocean fisheries and the study of insect population growth, spread, and reaction to insecticides (ex: flea beetles in a collard patch).

Climatology
Climatology depends on simulating the component forces that drive the climate, for example, ocean circulation and heat exchange between land, air, and ocean. It requires very sophisticated models based on physical principles, expressed as complex partial differential equations. These are implemented in very large-scale numerical codes on high-performance computers, and use data from observations of satellites, ocean buoys, and other monitoring equipment to drive the solutions. Typically, these rely on input from researchers in academia. Teams of workers at institutions such as the Department of Energy National Laboratories, NASA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) develop the computational codes.

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