Computing Environments for Biology

BST 272 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This course provides a high-level introduction to general computing environments appropriate for biological data analysis, as preparation for more advanced computational biology and bioinformatics courses. It is intended for biologists, clinician-researchers, other bench or translational scientists, or mathematicians with little to no computational or applied quantitative experience. It provides a compressed, highly interactive, hands-on introduction to basic command line, Python, and R environments for biological data analysis and visualization. It covers basic quantitative methods that can be carried out for 'omics data analysis in these environments and ensures that students have access to local and online (i.e. grid, cloud) resources for using these tools in the future. Finally, it thoroughly introduces freely available documentation and strategies for self-learning when using computational methods for biology research.