This evening members of the Wasmuth lab are off on a new adventure. Kaylee, Stephen and I heading to Addis Ababa, where we will delivering a five-day bioinformatics workshop at the Ethiopian Biotechnology Institute.
We’re building on the successful workshops run by Guido van Marle. Guido’s been running workshops in molecular biology and bioinformatics since 2008. Those workshops covered web-based resources. I’ve been wanting to go since I started at UCalgary in 2011. Life events (eg birth of children) got in the way. Now, we’re going!
Preparation for the workshop has been an interesting experience. There are several considerations, the two major ones intermittent internet and power. We’ve been working hard to come up with alternative strategies. The absence of a computing suite means that attendees will be bringing their own laptops. We’ll be using virtual machines, but different systems have had their nuances. More of that in a later post.
One important aspect has been how to have attendees gain experience with the command line. This is actually relatively simple. We registered the workshop with Datacamp. They have many excellent courses and one just for this occasion: ‘Introduction to the shell for data science.’ I have used this for the graduate course that I run and the students have given very favourable feedback. I want to thank the Datacamp team for giving us free access for this workshop.
Kaylee, Stephen and I will be posting about our experiences.
Wasmuth lab 