Professional Development in Bioinformatics and Big Data
UIUC offers short summer workshops to empower the Fisk faculty with the knowledge and capabilities to teach and explore Big Data Science.
Contact: Jessica Holmes
Computational Genomics
A-week-long mini course taught by the UIUC faculty covers diverse research topics in the field of genomics. The course includes introductory discussions, concurrent computer labs, and considerable reading and ancillary computer lab assignments. Topics such as statistics; genome sequencing; RNA-seq and transcriptome analysis; metagenomics and its health relevance; protein sequence, structure, and function; polymorphism and variant analysis; epigenomics; variant calling and association tests; sequence and genome alignment; and molecular variant simulation are covered.
Data Carpentry
Data Carpentry is a tools oriented summer workshop that provides concrete hands-on skills in using computational tools and computing architecture requisite for analyzing biomedical Big Data emerging from high-throughput sequencing methods. This domain-specific workshop covers processing on a cluster, analyzing RNA-seq data using R, managing data, and performing analysis in a reproducible and automated way. The lessons consist of lectures, narrated tutorials, and concrete in-class exercises.
Introduction to Bioinformatics
In an effort to make next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics techniques more accessible to all audiences, HPCBio (High Performance Computing in Biology) staff teach two 4-hour workshop sessions covering a variety of topics ranging from next-generation sequencing, quality assessment/control of sequencing reads, alignment, assembly, and RNA-Seq. HPCBio staff aim to familiarize and advise attendees on the why and how of current bioinformatics techniques through lectures and intuitive hands-on exercises, without needing to teach any technical skills or full bioinformatics analyses.