Dr. Rustici will present the ten best tips for setting up a good bioinformatics course, from defining what students can expect to learn and ensuring you have well-prepared students in your class, to putting the right infrastructure and environment in place to make you look like a superstar teacher. 

This talk will focus on the pedagogical aspects of bioinformatics training, with special emphasis on the hands-on experience. Dr. Kostadima will focus on the art of teaching as it applies to bioinformatics courses: what teaching methods are best suited to bioinformatics?

What aspects and perspectives change as one transitions from being behind the desk to being at the front of the room in a bioinformatics course? Dr. McGrath will speak on her experiences of shifting from a bioinformatics trainee to becoming a bioinformatics trainer.

This panel session will be a forum for discussion and exchange of strategies and approaches for developing and delivering a successful next generation sequencing course. Come share your experiences and ideas on putting on an NGS course with the panel and audience.

Whilst bioinformatics used to be the preserve of dedicated bioinformaticians a modern research group will now often have a significant amount of bioinformatics expertise within its staff. This will range from wet lab biologists who would like to be responsible for the analysis of their own data to dedicated embedded bioinformaticians who can find enough work from the output of a single group to fill their time. In this environment the role played by core facilities must necessarily change. Their traditional role as the analysis hub for a set of research groups must give way to a broader view of how they can help to support the more diverse range of informatics activities happening within a research institution. This session will look at the ways in which different core facilities have adapted to these changes and try to look at how their role will change further in future.

One of the growing roles for core facilities is to act as central service providers for routine large scale analyses or data stores. In this session we will look at how much it is possible to automate routine analyses and how much of a standard analysis pipeline can be treated in this way. We will aim to go further though and explore how core facilities can remain relevant and stay on top of the latest developments rather than being constrained as high volume service providers.

When a large proportion of the research staff in an institution want to be able undertake bioinformatics analyses on large data sets it makes sense to have a centralised computing resource on which to run this, and the management of these resources is generally falling into the hands of bioinformatics core facilities. We will look here at the ways in which different sites have chosen to make their compute infrastructure more widely available, and how they have tackled the problems which this has thrown up.

Many core facilities operate on a cost recovery basis, and the most common method of recharging has been around the number of hours of analyst time spent working on specific projects. In an era where the core facility is less visible as a front line analysis service and spends more of its time maintaining infrastructure and services how do cores continue to recoup their costs. We will look at the different funding models which are being used and will discuss the fairest and least burdensome ways of recharging and how to communicate these costs to end users.