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A decade ago, data scientist seemed like the sexiest job of the 21st century, to paraphrase an influential Harvard Business Review article.In the pharmaceutical industry, data science certainly continues to have tremendous potential, but in years to come, data-savvy biologists could have as least as much of an impact on drug development as data scientists, according to David Harel, co-founder and president of Cytoreason, which has developed a computational disease model for drug developers.
“We call this the biologist of the future,” Harel said, referring to biologists with significant data science training received either in academia or on the job.
The consulting firm Gartner has espoused a similar idea, which it terms a citizen data science to refer to workers outside of statistics and analytics who create data science models based on predictive or prescrip…