Resources

The FAS Informatics Group creates resources for bioinformatics analysis in the form of tutorials, walkthroughs, and both online and in-person workshops. We have also compiled links to other online resources.

Current workshops

Below is a list of all current workshops the Informatics Group runs. Workshop files may be temporarily unavailable as we update them during ongoing sessions.

Introduction to R (Fall 2023)

This workshop aims to introduce first-time users to the R programming language and the RStudio development environment. We will provide a basic introduction to coding in R and then shift to data manipulation using the tidyverse, a set of R libraries designed to handle data tables in a consistent and easy way. Then, we'll learn how to generate some basic plots to explore our data using ggplot. You do not need any prior programming experience to take this workshop. But also note that this workshop is not a comprehensive programming class nor a comprehensive statistics class. The main goal of this workshop is to get you familiar with reading your data into R and performing basic operations and generating figures.

Unix tips and tricks for bioinformatics (Spring 2024)

This workshop aims to introduce students to some basic bioinformatics file formats, tools, and general best practices. The first two days of the workshop will be dedicated to introductions of bioinformatics file formats and the command line tools that we use to view, manipulate, and analyze them. After that, we will begin to shift from using individual commands to writing shell scripts and constructing bioinformatics workflows.

Healthy Habits for Data Science (Spring 2024)

This workshop aims to teach students how to be more effective at working on their projects using reproducible habits. We learn how to organize projects on the local machine as well as the Cannon cluster, how to manage software environments, how to use git and GitHub to track code changes, and how to write and scale scripts on an HPC. Loose transcripts of the lectures are available below. Download the pdfs of the slides (if applicable) to follow along with the lecture.