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

Workshops

All workshops below will be held in person in Northwest Building 453 and will meet on Tuesdays and/or Thursdays. Registration for all workshops is free. Please do not register unless you can commit to attending as spots are limited by the size of the space reservation!

All in person workshops for the Fall 2025 semester have concluded. Please check the Latest Workshop Content section below for workshop materials.

Short Trainings (virtual)

Introduction to Genome Annotation

December 3, 2025 12 PM - 1 PM

This short training will consist of a broad overview of what genome annotation is, an explanation of the various approaches and how they differ, and discussion of what metrics one should consider using to evaluate genome annotation quality. Students will learn how to pick the right tool for annotation and how to evaluate the product of that tool.

Zoom Registration

Population Genomics: Getting started with SNPArcher

December 10, 2025 12 PM - 1 PM

This short training will introduce students to SNPArcher, a tool for population genomics analysis. We will cover the basics of how to use SNPArcher to analyze population genomics data, including how to run the tool and interpret the results.

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!

Fall 2025 Programming & Pizza dates:

September 10, Northwest Building room B227.45, 4:00-6:00PM

October 8, Northwest Building room B227.45, 4:00-6:00PM

November 12, Northwest Building room B227.45, 4:00-6:00PM

December 10, Northwest Building room B227.45, 4:00-6:00PM

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!

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