Events & Workshops

The FAS Informatics Group creates hosts events such as workshops, both online and in-person. Here is a list of upcoming events, as well as current and past workshop content!

Upcoming Events & Workshops

Here is our first round of events for the Spring 2026 semester!

For the most up to date workshop materials, check the Latest Workshop Content section below.

Short Trainings (virtual)

Command line 101: What's the deal with directories?

Thursday February 5 2026, 11AM - 12PM

Is this your first time sitting down typing commands into the command line or logging into the Cannon cluster to do your analysis? In this one hour seminar, we'll show you how files and directories are organized on the cluster, give tips on how to manage your own project directories, and more. You'll learn how to navigate a file system using the command line (aka the terminal), understand file permissions, and write files using the nano file editor. This seminar is suitable for absolute beginners to command line and cluster usage.

Zoom Registration

Command line 101: Tips & tricks for aspiring power users

Thursday February 12 2026, 11AM - 12PM

Now that you know how to move around the cluster, let's explore how to customize your command line experience. You'll learn about using dotfiles to automatically run things upon login, save and search your command history, use terminal multiplexers like screen, and more. If you plan to spend a good amount of time running programs on the command line, this seminar will save you effort and make your experience smoother!

Zoom Registration

Command line 101: Integrating your local and cluster compute environments

Thursday February 19 2026, 11AM - 12PM

In this seminar, we will cover topics and allow you to seamlessly move between your local environment to the cluster computer environment by using tools like VSCode and various file transfer applications. Geared towards both beginner and intermediate users, students will learn how to use apps to help them program and process data like a pro.

Zoom Registration

Command line 101: Git/GiHub on the cluster and on your computer

Thursday February 26 2026, 11AM - 12PM

This is a hands-on training teaching how to use command line git to version control your code and how to use GitHub to backup your scripts. To participate in the hands-on portion of the workshop, please have a github account. Cannon cluster account is optional. Users are expected to know how to create files and directories using the command line.

Zoom Registration

Recurring events

Office hours

We hold office hours every week on Wednesdays from 1:30 to 4:00pm in Northwest Building B227.45. If you can't make it in person, you can always contact us or ask your question on our Slack channel!

Programming and Pizza

We host programming and pizza events the second Wednesday of every month. Join us in our office in Northwest Building room B227.45 from 4:00 to 6:00 pm for a casual evening of coding, pizza, and conversation. Bring your laptop and any project you are working on, or just come to hang out and learn from others!

These will return in the Spring of 2026!

Calendar

This Google calendar will show all our upcoming office hours as well as any workshops we have scheduled.

Latest Workshop Content

This section contains the most up-to-date content for our workshops! The date we last updated and ran the workshop is noted.

Introduction to R (Fall 2025)

This workshop aims to introduce first-time users to the R programming language and the RStudio development environment. This 4 session workshop 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.

This course assumes no coding background and is suitable for beginners.

Intro to R Landing Page

Introduction to Snakemake (Fall 2025)

This two part intermediate level workshop introduces students to Snakemake , a workflow management system that allows you to create reproducible and scalable data analysis pipelines. In the first session we cover understanding the basics of running a Snakemake workflow. In the second session, we build on the first session and learn how to write a Snakemake workflow from scratch.

Snakemake Workshop Landing Page

Introduction to Nextflow (Fall 2025)

This 2 part intermediate level workshop introduces students to Nextflow , a workflow management system that allows you to create reproducible and scalable data analysis pipelines. In the first session we cover understanding the basics of running a Nextflow workflow. In the second session, we build on the first session and learn how to write a Nextflow workflow from scratch.

Nextflow Workshop Landing Page

Introduction to Python Intensive (Fall 2025)

This is a six day workshop that will introduce students to Python as a data science language. We teach the basics of programming and logic in the context of Python and go on to show the tools that use Python for modern data analysis. This assumes no prior knowledge of Python, but will move at a quick pace to cover all the content. The workshop meets for 3 hours for 4 sessions.

Python Intensive Landing Page

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.

Healthy Habits Landing Page

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.

Biotips Landing Page

Short Trainings

We piloted a series of short one hour short trainings in the Fall of 2024. These sessions are designed to be quick introductions to topics that we think are useful for researchers. Sessions with content are listed below. See our previous events page to view topics that were live demonstrations with no attached content (look for the short trainings icon: ). If you are interested in any of these topics, please let us know and we can schedule another workshop or just talk about it with you!

Population Genomics: Getting started with SNPArcher

December 10, 2025, 11:00AM-12:00PM (Virtual)

Download PDF of slides

Introduction to Genome Annotation

December 3, 2024, 11:00-12:00PM (Virtual)

Tutorial

DNA sequencing with long reads

November 19, 2025, 11:00AM-1:00PM (Virtual)

In collaboration with the Bauer Sequencing Core , we hosted a short training session on DNA sequencing with long reads. This training covered the basics of long-read sequencing technologies and analysis. We provide the necessary information for you to (1) choose the sequencing technology options best suited for your research question and/or your sample quality, (2) understand the pros and cons of a PacBio vs ONT assembly for your project, (3) anticipate decision making points in your experiment and how it might affect downstream processes.

Download PDF of slides

Introduction to single-cell RNA-seq analysis

Part 1: October 29, 2025, 12:00-1:00PM (Virtual)

Part 1 introduces students to the basics of single-cell RNA-seq analysis, including pre-processing and cleanup of data for downstream analyses.

Download RMD file View rendered notebook

Part 2: November 5, 2025, 12:00-1:00PM (Virtual)

Part 2 covers cluster marker gene discover, cell type annotation, and for multi-sample, multi-condition experiments, assessing and correcting batch effects, and differential expression analysis across experimental conditions. Note that to run the downloadable markdown below will require generating count matrices for the samples used in the training using cellranger count. Until we create an option for delivering the count matrices, please contact the Informatics Group for more information.

Download RMD file View rendered notebook