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This National Science Foundation (NSF) International Research Experience for Students (IRES) site centers around a common theme of bioinformatics. Students selected for this program spend 10 weeks at the Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) in Stockholm, Sweden using and developing bioinformatics tools to analyze ‘-omics’ (i.e. genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic) data generated from human subjects. Since the program’s inception, a significant amount of effort has been made developing programming to prepare students for their research projects. Specifically, technical training sessions focused on coding languages and professional development sessions focused on scientific communication have been developed and provided to the IRES students during the first two years of the program. While both technical and non- technical trainings have been developed for this IRES site, the focus of this paper is to highlight the technical training sessions since these materials were identified as an area for improvement in the external evaluation following the program’s first year.
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Work in Progress: Development of a Training Program to Prepare Students for an Immersive Bioinformatics Summer Research Experience
The publication of the first human genome in 2001 transformed biomedical research. Since then, an explosion of new sequencing technologies has required engineers and computer scientists to invent computational methods to analyze and interpret the ever-growing data. Now, large-scale biological data encompasses many types of ‘omics’ datasets, including genomes, transcriptomes, proteomes and metabolomes, and each of these new datasets has created a new set of analytical challenges. To meet this need, the field of bioinformatics has expanded significantly, but there is still a large need for engineers and scientists to work in this inherently interdisciplinary field. Properly trained bioinformaticians have expertise in computer science/engineering and understand the biological and medical context underlying their work. Therefore, the development of robust bioinformatics training programs is critical to educate the next generation of bioinformaticians. Although undergraduate degree programs in bioinformatics exist, providing students with hands-on bioinformatics skills through immersive research experiences is necessary to prepare students for graduate work. Thus, this work describes a recently funded NSF – International Research Experience for Students (IRES) site: US-Sweden Clinical Bioinformatics Research Training Program targeted at training students from diverse educational backgrounds to prepare them for authentic bioinformatics research experiences. Given the inherent interdisciplinary nature of bioinformatics, it is extremely difficult to design a training program that prepares students from different backgrounds (computer science, bioengineering, computational biology, biology) to be successful in a bioinformatics research group. Therefore, this ‘Work-in-Progress’ describes the pre-departure training program developed for this IRES site and the initial lessons learned.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1951792
- PAR ID:
- 10288804
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2021 American Society for Engineering Education Virtual Annual Conference
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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