Regarding the section on software engineering for biosecurity:
″...potentially on biosecurity and pandemic preparedness (I don’t currently know any examples of the latter, but think it’s reasonably likely there will be some down the line).”
— I have some experience with this having worked for the UK Joint Biosecurity Centre during the height of the pandemic (albeit briefly) in a data science role. I think it’s fair to say we had a reasonably sized influence on the analysis that went into government policy relating to the pandemic, with my seniors often reporting straight to the Prime Minister’s Office, and where ‘reasonably sized’ means JBC technical reports or slide decks might have made it into the top ten or even top five most influential policy documents that the most senior health officials would look at that day (very rough guess).
I would argue that data engineering was a reasonably sized bottleneck (that could have been addressed by having access to more good software engineers to help improve our data platforms) but that there were also difficulties in knowing what was relevant data etc, which was more of a data science problem. So really there were many bottlenecks to growth/research of which data engineering was just one (personal opinion).
As a piece of general career advice I would say that software engineers thinking of data engineering as a career would probably find their skills remain in the demand or possibly increase in the following decades, which might make it a good bet. Just as research software engineering is a thing, research data engineering is definitely a thing (if not always given that name) and more talented people working in this area would probably be good.
JBC might not exist in quite the same way for much longer because of how much the public health infrastructure in the UK is changing at the moment (personal opinion), but I think data (software) engineering in biosecurity and pandemic preparedness is definitely a thing (for as long as these institutions persist after covid). If you’re interested it helps to have some domain experience of what existing public health data infrastructure exists in your country or region, so that you know where to actually search for jobs. Alternatively you could go in through the contractor route although this seems like a less efficient way of working on the things you are actually interested in.
Great post.
Regarding the section on software engineering for biosecurity:
″...potentially on biosecurity and pandemic preparedness (I don’t currently know any examples of the latter, but think it’s reasonably likely there will be some down the line).”
— I have some experience with this having worked for the UK Joint Biosecurity Centre during the height of the pandemic (albeit briefly) in a data science role. I think it’s fair to say we had a reasonably sized influence on the analysis that went into government policy relating to the pandemic, with my seniors often reporting straight to the Prime Minister’s Office, and where ‘reasonably sized’ means JBC technical reports or slide decks might have made it into the top ten or even top five most influential policy documents that the most senior health officials would look at that day (very rough guess).
I would argue that data engineering was a reasonably sized bottleneck (that could have been addressed by having access to more good software engineers to help improve our data platforms) but that there were also difficulties in knowing what was relevant data etc, which was more of a data science problem. So really there were many bottlenecks to growth/research of which data engineering was just one (personal opinion).
As a piece of general career advice I would say that software engineers thinking of data engineering as a career would probably find their skills remain in the demand or possibly increase in the following decades, which might make it a good bet. Just as research software engineering is a thing, research data engineering is definitely a thing (if not always given that name) and more talented people working in this area would probably be good.
JBC might not exist in quite the same way for much longer because of how much the public health infrastructure in the UK is changing at the moment (personal opinion), but I think data (software) engineering in biosecurity and pandemic preparedness is definitely a thing (for as long as these institutions persist after covid). If you’re interested it helps to have some domain experience of what existing public health data infrastructure exists in your country or region, so that you know where to actually search for jobs. Alternatively you could go in through the contractor route although this seems like a less efficient way of working on the things you are actually interested in.