Workshop Descriptions

Third Annual Front Range Computational & Systems Biology Symposium Workshop registration will be prioritized on a first-come, first-serve basis. Workshop registration through the system does not guarantee that there is a seat available. In the event that a workshop is full, you will be contacted with the option to register for another workshop or to be put on the wait list. Contact Kate Sherrill with questions. 

Data Carpentry with R by Tobin Magle, Data Management Specialist at the Morgan Library

Good data management practices are becoming increasingly important in the digital age. Automation is essential for dealing with this “deluge of data”. Learning how to code can be intimidating, but will save you time and effort in the long run. This session will cover basic analysis of tabular data in R studio. This workshop is limited to 30 participants, This workshop is full as of 5/24/2017.  Contact Kate Sherrill with questions. 

Genomics Data Visualization Workshop by Dan Sloan, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology

This workshop will introduce participants to various computational tools for data visualization with the goal of generating accurate, informative, and attractive figures, which is an increasingly important part of scientific communication. The examples will be tailored to genetic and genomic datasets, but the tools should be broadly useful even for researchers working in other disciplines. There will be three specific learning goals for the workshop: 1) to generate circular representations of genome maps and data using Circos, 2) to generate complex multipanel data plots with the ggplot package in R, and 3) to use R as a tool for drawing geometric shapes and figures such as gene maps. Participants with no prior experience working from the command line are advised to take an online Linux or Unix tutorial prior to attending the workshop (for example: http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/). This workshop is limited to 24 participants, This workshop is full as of 5/31/2017.  Contact Kate Sherrill with questions.

Visualization in Microbiome Research by Zaid Abdo, Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology & Pathology

This session aims to introduce the use of the statistical software R for graphics in microbiome research. R is free software that, in addition to statistics, provides a flexible framework for graphics, modeling among other useful tools including, but limited to, sequence analysis and text manipulation and management. This session will focus on the use of some specific packages in R for graphics in association with microbiome and metagenomics data. This will include ggplots2, pheatmap, and vegan. To construct bar graphs, boxplots, dendrograms and ordination plots among others. We will start with data entry and manipulation; an important step for any data analysis and visualization task. We will then introduce basics of the package ggplots2 and show examples of use to generate graphs and manipulate their environment (background, legends, colors and titles).  Time permitting, we will follow with a description of pheatmap and vegan and provide some examples for cluster analysis and ordination plots. Participants in this program need to be familiar with the software R and must be able to navigate the system comfortably.  This workshop is limited to 18 participants, This workshop is full as of 5/25/2017.  Contact Kate Sherrill with questions.