I’m a graduate student improving my skills in building computational pipelines for genomic data. I’d like to start freelancing to build a portfolio and gain experience working with real wet lab data, and have the intuition that anybody working with genomic data can make use of computational pipelines.
So far, I’ve reached out to a few PhD contacts in wet labs at other universities, but I’m wondering what other avenues might be effective for finding projects.
Do researchers advertise small-scale bioinformatics help within universities (e.g., through listservs or departmental boards)?
Have others had success offering services through general freelance platforms (UpWork, Fiverr) or domain-specific ones like KolabTree?
I’d appreciate any advice from people who’ve successfully connected with wet lab scientists for freelance or collaborative projects.
I'm not sure how it works in other countries, but in the UK at least it would be quite unusual for a freelancer to be 'employed' on a research project where its is taxpayer grant money being used (unless maybe there was a fairly extensive track record of working with the instutition) - not impossible, but certainly uncommon and you'd need to be costed into the grant from the beginning usually.
Typically, you will need to jump through some hoops with a University to become an approved supplier, and I would hazard a guess that more often than not a research group which is looking to utilise this sort of help will already have access either to a collaborator or a centrally provided Uni resource.
That's not to say there isn't a need for this (my own academic lab did a lot of informatics with precious little dedicated support for this sort of thing), but whether there would be an engageable 'market' is another question.
Hi Istvan,
Thank you for the realistic answer. I redid analyses from interesting papers by using both the workflows in your book, the Biostars handbook, and through the class I'm taking right now.
I don't think it's a bad idea to continue redoing analyses from published papers and I'm happy to go along that route, and I agree with the risks you pointed out in terms of running into mismanaged projects.
However, I'm wondering if there is a market need for people who need pipelines, and there may be labs out there who do not have access to a core or bioinformatics help in house.
I think the most important thing is to have a visible portfolio - like a github repository that you can use to convince people that you can do the job.
That portfolio would be a good place to also explain your perspective on science, how you work, what you expect in return etc.
Just posting that you would like to work on a project is not enough. You need to demonstrate both competence and reliability. Most labs are risk-averse, they want evidence that you can take raw, messy data and deliver interpretable, publication-ready results without excessive supervision.
Once people can see clear examples of your work, engage where scientists actually look for help: here is a good place :-) , Slack groups for specific consortia, Twitter/X, Mastodon, or local genomics mailing lists.
Yes, I have a github going of projects and analyses I did. The OP was more to do something productive over winter break, but there are plenty of other ways to build the portfolio - it was suggested to me to look at CellxGene datasets for single cell analysis.