I'm a computer science guy with a few years of stable experience doing just about everything in terms of professional programming, looking to devote the rest of my career to hopefully improving the human condition. Computational neuroscience and related fields are the first things that fascinate me, after hearing countless interesting advancements in science podcasts and the like. Understandably though, it's somewhat difficult to gather information on what exactly I can do to start helping as a programmer in a field so based on early research publishing and early companies devoted to expensive proprietary products.

Any pointers that can help a guy in my position start on this path?

Ryan Fenton

To be a bit more clear - I'd rather be in a position to use my software development skills to help the actual neuroscientists better for experiments, visualize models, or verify their models against experiment, rather than get a degree in neuroscience and do independent research.

I expect that there's a lot of neuroscience folks out there that wouldn't really even know what they wanted in terms of software development, or would be so afraid of wasting limited resources that they wouldn't want to go down that road with someone who wasn't already highly trained in their field(s). It's just that at this point, finding just the right group to help in such a situation - with so many groups available is daunting at first.

In any case, it's a path I'm interested in intensely, and would love to help with if at all possible - and I know there's a lot of folks who could be helped with my efforts. It's finding out where I can help most that's always the problem.

Ryan Fenton