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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.

Research Services Showcase

Thursday March 4, 2026, 10:00AM–4:00PM (Virtual)

Join us for a virtual showcase of research services and support offerings across FAS.

Zoom Registration

Full schedule of speakers

Schedule

Time Core Speaker
10:00a Introduction Lei Ma
10:15a Harvard Center for Biological Imaging (HCBI) Alex Lovely
10:30a HCBI Emily Roloson
10:45a HCBI Evan Heller
11:00a HCBI Q&A
11:15a Harvard Center for Mass Spectometry Sunia Trauger
12:00p Bauer Sequencing Core Nicole El-Ali (Ramirez), Kelly Cribary, Jeff Nelson
12:15p Bauer Kelsie Lopez
12:30p Bauer Colin Kim
12:45p Bauer Q&A
1:00p FAS Research Computing (FASRC) Manasvita Joshi
1:15p FASRC Piyush Nanda
1:30p FASRC Q&A
1:45p Informatics Lei Ma, Tim Sackton
2:00p Informatics Jessica Whited
2:15p Informatics Robin Hopkins
2:30p Informatics Q&A
2:45p Library Ehsan Moghadam
3:00p Library Sarah Joan Kariko
3:15p Library Q&A

Research Services Showcase flyer

Short Trainings (virtual)

Command Line 101: SLURM and job management tips

Friday March 6, 2026, 11AM - 12PM

This virtual seminar will introduce students to the basic concept of a computing cluster and walk them through how to create jobs and monitor them.

Zoom Registration

How to effectively use LLMs and coding agents for bioinformatics

Thursday March 12, 2026, 11AM - 12PM

This virtual seminar will introduce some tips and tricks for productively working with LLMs, understanding their strong and weak points, and managing AI agents in the context of bioinformatics.

Zoom Registration

Introduction to single-cell RNA-seq analysis Part 1: Pre-processing and cleanup

Thursday March 19, 2026, 12PM - 1PM

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

Zoom Registration

Introduction to single-cell RNA-seq analysis Part 2: clustering, cell type annotation, and differential expression

Thursday March 26, 2026, 12PM - 1PM

Part 2 covers cluster marker gene discovery, cell type annotation, and for multi-sample, multi-condition experiments, assessing and correcting batch effects, and differential expression analysis across experimental conditions.

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!

Spring 2026 Programming & Pizza dates:

Februray 11, Northwest Building room B227.45, 4:00-6:00PM

March 11, Northwest Building room B227.45, 4:00-6:00PM

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

May 13, Northwest Building room B227.45, 4:00-6:00PM

Calendar

This calendar will show all our upcoming office hours as well as any workshops or events 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!

Command line 101

Introductions to working on computers through text interfaces, starting with file system basics (part 1) and moving to topics such as remote computing, customizing your shell environment (parts 2 and 3), git from the command line (part 4), and tips for the submitting jobs on the SLURM cluster (part 5).

  • Part 1: What's the deal with directories? Intro to file systems

    February 5, 2026, 11:00AM-12:00PM (Virtual)

    Download slides

  • Part 2: Tips & tricks for aspiring power users

    February 12, 2026, 11:00AM-12:00PM (Virtual)

    Download slides

  • Part 3: Integrating your local and cluster compute environments

    February 19, 2026, 11:00AM-12:00PM (Virtual)

    Download slides

  • Part 4: Git/GitHub on the cluster and on your computer

    Thursday February 26, 2026, 11AM - 12PM

    Download slides

Introduction to single-cell RNA-seq analysis

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

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.

All others

Event and Workshop Archive

To view a list of previous events and workshops, click the button below.

Previous Events & Workshops