Education and Training

The field of bioinformatics is very fast paced and can be a hard field to break into.  One main goal of the Genomics Research Center (GRC) Informatics team is to continuously generate and share educational materials to aid the University of Rochester research community in data analysis. We therefore provide tutorials and workshop materials for many common bioinformatics analyses and some computer science basics. Additionally, we regularly perform internal testing to stay up to date on emerging bioinformatics analysis methods and help our research community extract as much meaningful information from a dataset as possible.

Blackboard Course: 

You can find all of our educational materials on our Blackboard Course. Use the passcode GenomicsWorkshop to access the course. There are several categories of materials available, which are detailed below.

10-Minute Tutorials
These short tutorials are designed to introduce the user to one specific bioinformatic task. We are generating both markdown documents with well commented code and short videos demonstrating tasks that involve a GUI. Some examples include: principal component and pathway analyses, data visualization methods (e.g. ggplot2), and instructions for accessing your data delivered the GRC. 

Workshops
We strive to provide researchers with bioinformatics workshops that help familiarize users with genomics technologies and analysis methods. The materials for in-person workshops we have previously hosted are available on our Blackboard Course, and we additionally have a selection of pre-recorded workshops that users can follow at their own pace to learn about bioinformatics analysis. 

Past Workshops with materials available on Blackboard include:

- Annual GIDS Winter Workshop
This three day workshop series hosted every January covers topics like bulk and single cell RNAseq analysis, from initial quality filtering through differential expression and pathway analysis. This workshop also includes an introduction to using the command line and high performance computing clusters. We also provide an introduction to the coding language R. These workshops include a lecture portion, break for lunch, and then an interactive coding session where participants run code with the expert guidance of our bioinformatics team. 

- Spatial Transcriptomics Workshop Series
This workshop includes a series of three sessions presented over the course of 2025. The first session introduces participants to spatial transcriptomics technologies available through the GRC and GUI tools for data exploration. The second session focuses on the initial QC and analysis of spatial transcriptomics using tools like SquidPy in Python, including a short introduction to the Python coding language. The third session focuses on advanced analyses such as pseudotime and cell-cell interactions.

Supporting UR Science Series
All internal testing completed by the Genomics Research Center is summarized in a Supporting UR Science document. 
- Part I: Reduced Volume RNA Library Preparations
- Part 2: Single Cell Comparison Study (initial results)
- Part 3: Spatial Cell Segmentation
- Part 4: New Library Kit Testing - FY 27

The Center for Integrated Research Computing (CIRC) hosts very helpful events in terms of workshops and bootcamps throughout the year. We highly recommend those resources for anyone new to the computing infrastructure at the University.