I am wondering how others define the boundaries between bioinformatics, biostatistics, and computational biology.
In academic setting these three are treated as more or less equivalent terms or as significantly overlapping ones: genome analysis, phylogeny reconstruction, evolutionary models, modeling epidemics, calculating RNA structure, etc. All of these activities fall under any of the three titles with perhaps a slight accent on heavy data load when talking about bioinformatics or more of statistical analysis when talking about biostatistics.
However, when looking for a job in industry, the things change:
- Bioinformaticians are largely expected to be able to deal with large quantities of raw data: cleaning, assembling and doing a bit of analysis;
- Biostatisticians are expected to have a perfect knowledge of the experiment design and the multitude of the statistical tests;
- Computational biologists are those who do not have a proper (i.e. confirmed by a diploma) bioinformatician or biostatistician training, but came to the field from elsewhere (biology, physics, etc.) Although this largely prevents them from competing for bioinformatician and biostatistician jobs, big research labs are interested in such people.
This reflects my own experience and observations, which is why I would like to know opinions of the other members of the community.