Tag: Education

NCBI’s First-Ever BioEd Summit Was a Success!

NCBI hosted its first-ever BioEd Summit: Crafting Student-Centric Curricula with NCBI resources. This week-long, in-person event for science educators across the U.S. was held on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, MD, from August 5-9, 2024.

Event Details

During the week, educators participated in morning sessions including interactive workshops on NCBI educational curricular design, the use of various NCBI resources in teaching, and detailed hands-on discussions and practice with NCBI tools. A panel discussion on employing novel, data-driven, active learning exercises in science classes with leaders from several institutions including: Continue reading “NCBI’s First-Ever BioEd Summit Was a Success!” →

Announcing NCBI’s First Ever BioEd Summit!

An in-person training opportunity for science educators

Calling all high school, community college, and undergraduate science educators! NCBI is excited to host our first BioEd Summit on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, MD, from August 5-9, 2024. Join us for a week-long, in-person event where you will collaborate with other educators and NCBI experts to create data-driven curricula. You’ll leave the event with an exciting, novel lesson you can use in your classroom to prepare your students for real-world scientific research.

Event details

Interactive training workshops on NCBI resources
Panel discussion on employing data-driven, active learning exercises in science classes
Codeathon-style curricula-thon with team projects to create a curricular package (learning objectives, course materials, and assessments)

Continue reading “Announcing NCBI’s First Ever BioEd Summit!” →

Celebrating 1 Year of NCBI Virtual Outreach Events

We launched the NCBI Virtual Outreach Event series in the fall of 2021 to expand our online outreach to a worldwide audience of people who use NCBI resources for biological/biomedical research, science education, and clinical applications. Our virtual outreach events include interactive workshops, webinars, and codeathons. In the past year, we have hosted 34 virtual events and served over 1,600 participants (Figure 1).

Continue reading “Celebrating 1 Year of NCBI Virtual Outreach Events” →

April 22 Webinar on NCBI’s ALFA: allele frequency data for variant analysis and interpretation

On Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 12 PM, join NCBI staff to learn how results from the Allele Frequency Aggregator (ALFA) project will help you interpret the biological impact of common and rare sequence variants. ALFA’s initial release includes analysis of genotype data from ~100K unrestricted dbGaP subjects and provides high-quality allele frequency data now displayed on relevant dbSNP records. In this webinar, you will learn about the data in the recent ALFA release, see how to access the data from the web, FTP, and how to programmatically retrieve data by positions, genes, and other attributes using E-utilities and Variation Services API in Python.

Date and time: Wed, Apr 22, 2020 12:00 PM – 12:45 PM EDT
Register

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information about attending the webinar. A few days after the live presentation, you can view the recording on the NCBI YouTube channel. You can learn about future webinars on the Webinars and Courses page.

November 13 NCBI Minute: Resources for next-gen sequence analysis

On Wednesday, November 13, 2019 at 12 PM, NCBI staff will present a webinar on NCBI resources for next-gen sequence analysis. You will learn about key resources that support multiple aspects of next-gen sequence analyses, including quality control, alignment, data visualization and interpreting results. You will also see how to access and apply these resources for both SRA and your own RNASeq/DNASeq datasets. Whether you’re embarking on your first analysis or already have a background in bioinformatics, you’ll find tools that meet your needs!

Date and time: Wed, Nov 13, 2019 12:00 PM – 12:45 PM EDT
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Presentation on NCBI’s genome browser at Rocky Mountain Genomics Hackcon

On June 18, 2019, NCBI’s Sanjida Rangwala will demonstrate the rich data visualization capabilities of NCBI’s genome browser at a conference that is part of the Rocky Mountain Genomics Hackcon. As mentioned in a previous post, NCBI staff will also participate in an NCBI-style Hackathon as part of the larger event. The genome browser presentation and demonstration will show you how to create visuals that provide insights and show connections among genes, transcripts, variation, epigenomics and GWAS data from NCBI sources. You will also see how you can upload your own data and embed NCBI viewers on your own pages.

NCBI to help with Rocky Mountain Genomics HackCon, June 17 – 21, 2019

The NCBI will participate in a one-day conference on June 18, 2019 and a hackathon, June 19-21, 2019 as a part of Rocky Mountain Genomics Hackcon 2019 at the BioFrontiers Institute in Boulder Colorado.

The conference will feature technical speakers in precision medicine, metagenomics, and advanced RNA-Seq analysis, as well as an exhibitor and poster session. The hackathon will focus on creating visualization tools for exploratory data analysis.

Many people who attend these events have experience working with large datasets or the development of informatics tools, code, or pipelines; however, researchers who are in earlier stages of their data science journey, including students and postdocs are also encouraged to apply. Some projects are available to other non-scientific developers, mathematicians, or librarians. The event is open to anyone selected for the hackathon and willing to travel to Boulder, Colorado.

Please visit the Rocky Mountain Genomics Hackcon 2019 site for more details and information on how to attend.

Women-led Biodata Science Hackathon May 8-10, 2019

NCBI is excited to host our first Women-led Hackathon, a collaborative biodata science event organized by women on the NIH Campus in Bethesda, Maryland!

NIH has a strong interest in enhancing the diversity of the scientific workforce, and women in particular are underrepresented in data science. This women-led NCBI initiative strongly encourages researchers, especially women, at any stage of their data science journey to apply for this inaugural event. Past hackathon participants have ranged from students and postdocs with a working knowledge of scripting (e.g. Shell, Python, R) to those already engaged in the use of large datasets or in the development of informatics tools, code, or pipelines.

Potential topics include:

An open store for variant and gene prioritization tools
Variable Tracking and Schema Capturing to make Biomedical Research Data ‘FAIR’
Molecular language: discovery of cell-to-cell communication molecules from RNA-Seq data
dsVirus variant discovery and annotation pipeline
Design of ICD-9 to 10 conversion function for the R package ‘icd’
Hiding in plain sight — unannotated structural variants in public genomic data sets

Continue reading “Women-led Biodata Science Hackathon May 8-10, 2019” →

October 10 Webinar: Using NCBI Medical Genetics Resources: MedGen, ClinVar, GTR

Next Wednesday, October 10, 2018, NCBI staff will show you how to use the NCBI resources MedGen, ClinVar, and GTR to locate records for a specified list of symptoms or clinical features, explore specific disease-causing variants, see the review status of the clinical significance for a genetic variant, and find tests relevant to a clinical feature, gene or disease. You will also learn which resource works best for different types of searches.

Date and time: Wed, Oct 10, 2018 12:00 PM – 12:45 PM EDT

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October 3, 2018 Webinar: Using BLAST Well

Next Wednesday, October 3, 2018, the lead of the NCBI BLAST group will show you how to be more effective with NCBI’s standalone BLAST applications. You will learn how to optimize database selection, output formats, taxonomy information and use our next-gen alignment program Magic-BLAST. You can also use many of these strategies to improve your web BLAST searches.

Date and time: Wed, Oct 3, 2018 12:00 PM – 12:45 PM EDT

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