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Mission & Services
The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences Informatics Group (FAS Informatics) is a small group of scientists and software developers working to advance research and teaching by facilitiating computational analysis of scientific data. While our background is primarily in biology and biological data, we are happy to assist in any data science tasks. We work closely with data-generating scientific cores and with students, postdocs, and faculty in analyzing data to help make research and discovery efficient and productive.
The mission of the Bioinformatics Core includes training, consulting, and research. We organize in several ways to facilitate these goals.
Workshops
We run a series of workshops on bioinformatics and computational biology topics, which are open to the entire Harvard community. These workshops cover a range of subjects, from introductory programming in Python and R to more advanced topics like single-cell RNA-seq analysis and population genomics. Our goals are to (1) provide an accessible onramp to data science and computational biology to those without a computational background and (2) equip researchers with the skills they need to analyze biological data effectively.
Visit our Workshops & Events page to see our schedule and view past workshop materials:
One-on-one advising through Consults
We also offer one-on-one consultations to researchers who need help with their projects. This includes assistance with data analysis, troubleshooting computational methods, and advice on best practices in bioinformatics. Our team is composed of experts in various areas of computational biology, and we are committed to helping researchers at all levels, from undergraduates to faculty. A consult can consist of one or more meetings, in-person or virtual, depending on the needs of the researcher. Additionally, we also host office hours every Wednesday from 1:30 to 4:00 PM in our office (B227 Northwest Science Building), where researchers can drop by for quick questions or advice, and we have a Slack channel open to the Harvard community where we are available to answer questions.
To schedule a consult or view info about office hours and our Slack channel, please visit our Contact page:
And here is a sampling of some topics of recent consults:
Recent FAS Informatics Consults
Consultee: A research scientist in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases (HSPH )
Lead Bioinformatician: Gregg Thomas
The researcher needed help running whole genome alignment with Cactus using our Cactus Snakemake workflow.
Consultee: Woo lab (Chemistry & Chemical biology )
Lead Bioinformatician: Danielle Khost and Tim Sackton
The Woo lab was examining the effects several pharmaceutical compounds had on transcription and intron skipping and noticed some discrepancies in their read mapping. They asked us to see if we could recapitulate the result, and we developed some custom code to analyze the proportion of intron skipping between treatment conditions.
Consultee: A postdoc in the Dulac lab (MCB )
Lead Bioinformatician: Gregg Thomas
A project required random sub-sampling of 10x Genomics single cell ATACseq generated reads. This required development of a small Snakemake workflow.
= question from an office hours session; = question from the FAS Informatics Slack channel
Collaborations & Research
Labs may arrange for longer-term collaborations with us, where we work closely with the lab on a specific project to develop custom software solutions or analyze data. These collaborations are projects in which we participate to the level of authorship. We also conduct grant-funded research in comparative and population genomics, as well as internal projects in bioinformatics, focusing on method development and best practices investigations to meet the needs of the research community. We develop Software to support our research and collaborations.
For more information about our research and collaborations, please visit our Research page:
People
Northwest Labs, B227.65
Danielle is our resident expert in long read sequencing, and works on a variety of challenging genome assembly problems.
Northwest Labs, B227.20
Lei is primarily responsible for developing training and outreach material; she also has a background in metagenomics and microbial ecology.
Prior to 2025, the group also included the Software Operations Core. Their mission is to support the needs of data generation core facilities by developing software infrastructure. This includes everything from data processing pipelines, to instrument scheduling and training, to billing and invoicing.
As of February 2025, Software Operations has moved to Research Computing !
Group Alumni
(2024)
Abhro was a visiting student from the Curie Institute in France. He used comparative genomics to study Hi-C maps in Lepidoptera.
(2021-2024)
Former postdoc, Subir works on population and comparative genomics of birds. He is now a postdoc at LMU Munich.
(2021-2024)
Rawan was funded by a collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim, and works on single cell RNA-seq methods.
(2023-2024)
Former full stack developer for instrument facility applications
(2019-2022)
Alexandria primarily worked with the mass spec core and the Woo lab while she was in the group.
(2020-2022)
Scott is now a Scientific Investigator in Computational Biology at GSK.
Former full stack developer currently at Cisco
(2019-2021)
Sara is now an Assistant Professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada.
(2019-2021)
Alex is now at the Universidad Complutense Madrid.
(2017-2021)
Juerg worked primarily on proteomics data with the Mass Spec Core and the Melton Lab while he was in the group.
(2018-2020)
Brian is now a departmental data scientist with the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department at Princeton.
(2017-2020)
Yasin is now an Assistant Professor at Ege University in Izmir, Turkey.
(2018-2020)
Tommy is now the Director of Computational Biology at Immunitas Therapeutics.
(2017-2019)
John is now a Data Science and Bioinformatics Team Lead at Merck.
(2017-2018)
Allison is now the Associate Curator of Ornithology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
Former front end developer for instrument facility applications
Where to Find Us
We are located in Northwest Science Building , on the B2 floor, near the Bauer Sequencing Core . Our offices are in the B227 suite. We hold regular office hours, and you can also contact us here.
Harvard FAS Informatics Group
Northwest Building B227
52 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
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