Question: Have collaborations played a significant part in your research?

Zoe Vance answered on 29 Apr 2024:

It’s varied a bit across my career so far, some kinds of research need collaborators more than others. I’ve always worked entirely in computational bio, but during my PhD I mainly worked on my own with publicly available data so the only reason to bring other people into it was for discussing ideas or if I was having difficulty (both still very good reasons!). Now I work in viruses it can be a lot more necessary to have collaborators who are doing the genetic sequencing of viruses, or who are local to an outbreak and can get data out quickly, or generate specific types of data. Being on the computational end of things means I can be quite reliant on others who actually work on the bench to create data for me if nothing suitable exists in public data. I think collaboration is a good thing in general though, more diversity of thought is always helpful in research provided it’s a fair and balanced collaboration.