Grant: Dissemination Events

Informatics skills play a fundamental role in all aspects of health research today. This reality is compounded by the speed with which new high-throughput technologies are being introduced and the plethora of informatics tools and databases being developed to capitalize on this data explosion. Researchers increasingly require advanced computational skills to aid discovery and translation from their research. Yet adequate translational programs do not exist wherein a researcher can gain the necessary informatics skills. The Canadian Bioinformatics Workshop (CBW) series provides informatics knowledge and skill development opportunities for the research community. By providing access to a comprehensive series of skill development opportunities in informatics, the CBW series aims to translate its informatic expertise to the health research community, thereby enhancing Canada's knowledge base and advancing our translational research efforts. The CBW proposal is thus seeking $25,000 support from CIHR to sponsor research trainee attendance at each of 5 bioinformatics workshops being offered in 2013. Since the workshop series already functions under a sustainable funding model, all funding from this CIHR application will be used to directly support the knowledge and skill development of research trainees. The proposed series of 5 workshops are intensive, hands-on sessions designed to guide researchers through commonly identified informatic challenges in research, including how to analyze high-throughput sequencing or metabolomic data, how to interrogate RNA sequence data and how to determine which cellular pathways and networks are altered in a given condition, as well as how to explore and statistically evaluate one's biological data.