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!
Fall 2025 Upcoming events & workshops
Workshops
A 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!
Introduction to Python Intensive
Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM from September 2 to September 18th
Northwest Building 453
Our annual python intensive serves as an introduction to coding and data analysis with the python programming language. This course assumes zero programming knowledge, but will move at a quick pace to cover all the content. This will be a 3 week workshop that runs twice per week for 3 hours each session.
Day 1-3: Introduction to coding with python
- Programming basics and intro to logic and control
- Iterables, Lists, and Dictionaries
- Writing functions
Day 4-6: Python as a data science language
- Reading and writing files into dictionaries
- Introduction to tidy data manipulation with Pandas dataframes
- Plotting with Seaborn
Note
If you are familiar with other coding languages or have some experience with python before, you may choose to sign up for only Days 4-6. A quick self-test would be: Write a function that takes two lists of numbers and returns the list with the highest mean. You can also look at past exercises here.
Introduction to Snakemake
Snakemake Run: September 30, 2025 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Snakemake Develop: October 7, 2025 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Northwest Building 453
This 2 part intermediate level workshop will introduce students to Snakemake, a workflow management system that allows you to create reproducible and scalable data analysis pipelines. In the first session we will cover understanding the basics of running a Snakemake workflow. In the second session, we will build on the first session and learn how to write a Snakemake workflow from scratch.
Pre-requisites:
- Does not have to have written any scripts themselves
- Can navigate the Terminal using command line.
- Can read basic BASH scripts
- Has previously run SBATCH jobs on the cluster
- Has previously run command line software before
- Has used conda or singularity in the past to manage software
Note
You may sign up for only Snakemake Run or both Snakemake Run and Snakemake Develop. Run is a pre-req to Develop.
Introduction to R
Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:30-12:30 from October 14, 2025 to October 23, 2025
Northwest Building 453
Introduction to R is a 4 day workshop that prepares students to manipulate and plot data in RStudio using the R programming language. This course assumes no coding background and is suitable for beginners. This is an updated version of our previous Introduction to R workshop. See below for more details.
Introduction to Nextflow
This 2 part intermediate level workshop will introduce students to Nextflow, a workflow management system that allows you to create reproducible and scalable data analysis pipelines. In the first session we will cover understanding the basics of running a Nextflow workflow. In the second session, we will build on the first session and learn how to write a Nextflow workflow from scratch.
Pre-requisites:
- Does not have to have written any scripts themselves
- Can navigate the Terminal using command line.
- Can read basic BASH scripts
- Has previously run SBATCH jobs on the cluster
- Has previously run command line software before
- Has used conda or singularity in the past to manage software
Note
You may sign up for only Snakemake Run or both Snakemake Run and Snakemake Develop. Run is a pre-req to Develop.
Short trainings (virtual)
The Baton Pass: Data Onboarding and Offboarding
August 27, 2025 11 AM - 1 PM
This training will focus on the best practices for onboarding and offboarding data in research projects. We will cover how to document data sources, ensure reproducibility, and maintain data integrity throughout the project lifecycle. We will go over a template for creating an onboarding document and an offboarding checklist that is specific to those of us who deal with biological data.
Basics of git and GitHub
September 24, 2025 12 PM - 1 PM
Short training on the basics of git and GitHub for project sharing and backup. Demonstration will be using GitHub Desktop application so no command line familiarity is required. If you want to follow along, please sign up for GitHub and install GitHub Desktop.
Introduction to single-cell RNA-seq
Part 1: October 29, 2025 12 PM - 1 PM
Part 2: November 5, 2025 12 PM - 1 PM
This 2 part training will introduce students to the basics of single-cell RNA-seq analysis. In the first session, we'll go over basic quality control of scRNA data. In the second session, we'll go over some downstream analysis of scRNA data.
DNA sequencing with long reads
November 19, 2025 11 AM - 1 PM
In collaboration with the Bauer Sequencing Core , we'll be hosting a short training session on DNA sequencing with long reads. This training will cover the basics of long-read sequencing technologies and analysis. We will provide you with 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.
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.
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.
Recurring events
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 Fall of 2025!
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!
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 Python Intensive (January 2025)
This is a four-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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Data transformation in R with Tidyverse
October 22, 2024, 9:30-10:30AM and October 23, 2024, 12:15-1:15PM (Northwest Building 453)
Traning page - Download RMD file
Plotting in R with ggplot
October 29, 2024, 9:30-10:30AM and October 30, 2024, 12:15-1:15PM (Northwest Building 453)
Training page - Download RMD file
Workflow managers and Nextflow demo
November 12, 2024, 9:30-10:30AM and November 13, 2024, 12:15-1:15PM (Northwest Building 453)
Introduction to single-cell RNA-seq analysis
November 19, 2024, 9:30-10:30AM and November 20, 2024, 12:15-1:15PM (Northwest Building 453)
Population Genomics: Getting started with SNPArcher
December 10, 2024, 9:30-10:30AM and December 11, 2024, 12:15-1:15PM (Northwest Building 453)
Event and workshop archive
To view a list of previous events and workshops, click the button below.