0
Youtube tutorial videos about computational biology and bioinformatics
ActiveGrant
$1,000raised
$1,000funding goal
Longer description of your proposed project
I’m a computational biologist for my day job, and in my free time I make tutorial videos about this field. Here’s my channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/mikesaint-antoine
Immediate Goal
My immediate goal is simply to make videos that will be useful to people who are trying to learn about computational biology, bioinformatics, and general data science. I’ve always found Youtube tutorials to be an extremely valuable resource, whether I was learning about a topic for school, work, or just for fun. Now I’m in a position where I can “pay it forward” by adding to this knowledge base myself.
I’m also trying to make videos specifically to fill in a gap that needs to be filled. The field of computational biology / bioinformatics is relatively new so there aren’t very many tutorial videos on it yet. It isn’t like calculus or physics, where there are already tons of free tutorials out there for the basics. At the same time, computational biology is getting quite popular as a career field lately, so there’s some unmet demand for free educational material.
I actually noticed this gap myself when I was in my first year of grad school. In undergrad I had relied heavily on online tutorials to fully learn the topics I was supposed to be learning in my classes — math, programming, economics, etc. But in my grad school bioinformatics and computationally biology classes, I found that I could NOT do this. The videos were missing, even for the very basics. So that was when I first had the idea to fill in the gap myself.
Secondary Goals:
Force-multiplier for other worthy causes, including longevity research, embryo screening with polygenic scores, malaria eradication, new drug development, etc. Part of what I’m trying to do with my project is to facilitate entry into these cause areas (which all involve computational biology), particularly for people who have backgrounds in quantitative fields but little or no biology experience. This is partly a matter of simply creating the free educational material so that people can learn the necessary skills, and partly a matter of convincing people to switch from other quantitative fields to these areas (which is surprisingly easy — I did it myself). I think the non-monetary benefits to this grant would be helpful with this. Being able to network with biotech-related grant recipients would be especially helpful, as it would help me make tutorials specifically tailored to these cause areas. The free publicity on ACX would also be helpful, as it could lead to some people in the community becoming interested in biotech and realizing that they could switch to this field pretty easily.
Promoting alternatives to the current university -> credential -> job market system. Universities are extremely expensive now (see “Against Tulip Subsidies”), even though the same knowledge can usually be learned for free online. It would be much more efficient and save a lot of people a lot of money if there was a shift away from credential-based hiring and towards skill-based hiring, with more recognition of non-traditional educational backgrounds, like learning skills from online tutorials. Of course I can’t change this by myself, but I think my project is at least pushing in that direction and may have some small impact in changing the biotech industry to be less credentialist and more accepting of self-education (like the regular tech industry).
Future Plans:
At the very least, I’ll continue making videos at around the same frequency and quality-level that I’ve been making them.
I’d like to improve production quality, both by getting better at making videos through practice and also by possibly investing in better recording equipment and editing software. I’m also working on learning animation in the style of 3Blue1Brown (see my most recent videos) and plan to keep working on that.
I’ve bought the domain names learncompbio.org and learnbioinformatics.org, and am thinking about what to do with them. I may use them to post a “curriculum” of free resources for learning computational biology and bioinformatics, with links to my videos as well as others, in a suggested order for studying.
I may try to establish collaborations with other people working in computational biology, but on topics that I’m not familiar with. Maybe this will take the form of actually hiring people or offering bounties to make videos on these topics, or maybe I’ll just end up convincing them to start their own channels.
I’d like to encourage other people (especially in the ACX community) to do projects like this, making free tutorials on the skills needed to do their day-jobs, and to possibly do some advocacy to promote recognition of non-traditional education and skill-based hiring. I’ll probably keep this separate from my Youtube channel because I don’t want it to get too political.
Describe why you think you're qualified to work on this
I’m a professional computational biologist and work at a research lab at UPenn for my day job. My work is mostly bioinformatics and machine learning, applied to the study of circadian rhythms in gene expression. I've been at this position for about 7 months.
Before starting this job, I completed a PhD in computational biology at the University of Delaware, with research focused on gene regulatory networks, transcriptomic data analysis, and stochastic modeling of cell populations. This included theoretical work, as well as applications in a variety of biological contexts, ranging from cancer research to botany. (To be honest, I feel a bit silly bragging about having a PhD, especially since the whole point of my project is to promote a non-traditional, non-credential-based form of education. There are people in this field who don’t have PhDs and are much smarter than me. Still, I think the 5 years of work experience from my time in grad school was pretty valuable and I’m reasonably knowledgeable about these topics now.)
Here’s my current publication record — all from grad school, I haven’t published anything at my new job yet:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=CEz_p0UAAAAJ&hl=en
If you’d like to read any of these papers and find that they’re behind a paywall, please send me an email and I’ll send you the PDF.
Before grad school, I did my undergrad in economics at NYU (this turned out to be surprisingly relevant to my current work in terms of the math and data analysis involved). I also did some computer programming / data science work at a couple different jobs, first in economics/business and then eventually as a contractor for a biology lab. In total, I've been getting paid to write code and analyze data for about 8.5 years now (2 years in economics/business, and 6.5 years in biology).
Degrees and work experience aside, I think my most important qualification is that I’m already doing this project and people are already finding it helpful. Although it’s not a traditional reference, I’d like to offer as a reference the comments on the videos that I’ve already made. Here’s one example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbHzmgWfXeY
This was a video I made after getting a specific request from a viewer saying he couldn’t find any videos on this topic, and asking me to cover it. After I posted it, I got a lot of nice comments from people who I think are in the same program as the guy who made the original request, saying that they found it helpful. A lot of my videos have comments like these, and I think those comments are probably the best reference I can give that this project is having a positive impact.
Other ways I can learn about you
Youtube Channel (most important):
https://www.youtube.com/c/mikesaint-antoine
Academic publication record:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=CEz_p0UAAAAJ&hl=en
Substack blog (mostly about prediction markets — unrelated to grant project):
Twitter:
How much money do you need?
The upper bound on what I would accept is $1000, since I think I could use that much to buy some fancy recording equipment and video editing / animation software to improve the quality of the videos. But the main reason I’m applying for this grant is for the non-monetary benefits (the free publicity/advertising and networking opportunities) so I would be happy to receive no money at all and just get those. I can already spend my own money on the costs of this project, so that isn’t a limiting factor to what I’m doing, but some free advertising on the ACX platform and networking with biotech-related grant recipients would be very helpful.
Links to any supporting documents or information
Youtube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/mikesaint-antoine
Academic publication record:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=CEz_p0UAAAAJ&hl=en
Estimate your probability of succeeding if you get the amount of money you asked for
Success in this case isn’t a binary yes/no. Really the project has already succeeded, since people are already watching the videos and finding them helpful, and it will almost definitely continue to succeed. Now the goal is to scale this success — make more and higher-quality videos, cover more topics, reach more people, and possibly set up collaborations with other scientists who want to make tutorial videos.