There's a company called VeriSIM life trying to make the physiological models mentioned in the post more accessible [1]. They apparently fit their models across a bunch of publicly available and proprietary data. I found some peer-reviewed publications (e.g. [2]), but I am not sure how widely they are used.
Just played around with this and I think I'll be using it on some research projects!
One cool feature would be some sort of chaining, where you could anchor a new query to a previous one.
For example, on the sales data demo, I started with the howto query "Plot the sales per month in a bar chart using plotly."
However, I got a bug since "Order Date" wasn't a datetime, so I added "Make sure to make 'Order Date' a date column." The new code worked, but gave months as integers 1-12.
When I added "Include month name on x-axis (e.g., Jan, Feb, ...).", the model sort of gave up and spit out some buggy code that didn't make a bar plot.
In this example, it would be great to be able to chain the howto commands, so the previous result is used as context for the new one.
I left the US to do a UK PhD for this reason. No teaching responsibilities and you can just do the PhD. And they really try to kick you out after four years (at least in Cambridge).
What field were you in? I feel like PhDs in fields with a strong job market for R&D (e.g., machine learning, biomedical or chemical engineering) can be worth it. I think, otherwise, it can be really difficult.
I agree with the whisper net comment. You learn about who's good and bad pretty quickly once you get into a department, but everyone is hush-hush otherwise. We need a glassdoor for academia.
It's quite a beast!