Bootcamp for bioinformatics

By Damien Irving.

In March 2014 a group of 40 bioinformatics researchers from around Melbourne attended one of our Software Carpentry bootcamps (see the website for details). As is the case in many of the sciences, the amount of programming that biologists are required to do has increased rapidly in recent years. Since programming skills aren’t typically taught at an undergraduate level, most Masters, PhD and post-doc researchers are self-taught. They consequently spend hours doing things that should take minutes, reinvent a lot of wheels, and at the end of it all still don’t know if their results are reliable.

Anna shares her thoughts on the bioinformatics bootcamp… (she has also put her hand up to join our R teaching team - thanks Anna!)


Recognising this as a problem for their members, Scott and Harriet from COMBINE - a bioinformatics group aimed at students and early-career researchers in Australia - came along to Hacky Hour to ask about co-hosting a bootcamp for their discipline. We were of course more than happy to help out, as co-hosting with student groups is one of our favourite ways to deliver a bootcamp. The student group (in this case COMBINE) has the contacts and social networks that we don’t have, while we have the experience in teaching this stuff that they don’t have, so it’s a win-win! Since Harriet had previously put her hand up to join our Python teaching team, she gave a short lesson at the end of the bootcamp about the Biopython package, which proved to be a very popular addition to the regular teaching materials.

If you attended the COMBINE bootcamp then you are of course more than welcome to attend Hacky Hour to get further assistance with your programming. Like Harriet and Anna, you might also like to join one of our teaching teams and help others with their coding. If you didn’t attend this bootcamp but like the sound of what they’re about, please get in touch (research.bazaar@gmail.com) and we can talk about putting on a bootcamp for your student group, department or lab!