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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. 

This National Science Foundation (NSF) project focuses on creating an immersive international summer research experience for students enrolled in a primarily undergraduate institution (PUI). Over the course of a three-year grant period, this research seeks to: (1) train and mentor 18 diverse undergraduate students from PUIs in Southern California in bioinformatics research in a collaborative and international setting; (2) disseminate the research outcomes at conferences and in peer-reviewed journals; (3) encourage and prepare undergraduate students from PUIs for enrollment in graduate programs in bioinformatics, bioengineering, or related fields; (4) foster existing collaborations and develop new research collaborations between the PI at the University of San Diego (USD) and scientists at the Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) in Sweden; and (5) develop a diverse cohort of globally engaged scientists/engineers that seek career opportunities and collaborators throughout the world. This paper reports on the first year of the grant. 

The US-Sweden Clinical Bioinformatics Research Training Program is an NSF-funded International Research Experience for Students (IRES) program that aims to develop a diverse cohort of globally competent and engaged scientists/engineers that seek career opportunities and collaborators throughout the world. The program consists of a six-week preparatory virtual training series, a 4-day pre-departure symposium at the University of San Diego and a ten-week research program on site at the Science for Life Laboratory in Stockholm, Sweden. The focus of this paper is to examine student attitudes and perspectives during their time abroad through an analysis of blog entries. In Summer 2021, six engineering undergraduates—three women and three men—participated in the inaugural program session. Over the course of the ten-week program, the students completed blog posts in response to four prompts related to their experiences, observations, and challenges. In this paper, we present a qualitative analysis of the student blogs using a hybrid deductive and inductive thematic analysis approach. Our findings span two primary categories: professional and personal. 

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.