Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

For the past 25 years, the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops (CBW) have offered short-form training in bioinformatics and computational biology to researchers from Canada and around the world. While CBW training is highly effective, research shows that equity-deserving groups are still underrepresented in the sciences, and CBW is now in a position to provide training to address this problem. If bioinformatics researchers are not aware of the assumptions made by traditional statistical methods, they may leave out meaningful results because they seem like outliers. Such research oversights result in poor health outcomes for underserved groups. Researchers need to be equipped with a deep understanding of how to recognize and prevent bias in analysis. To address these needs and ensure our training is inclusive, diverse, equitable, and accessible, the CBW is seeking CIHR funding to develop a first-of-its-kind Train-the-Trainer (TtT) program. This program will teach existing CBW instructors (and later, new and external instructors) how to incorporate principles of inclusivity, diversity, equity, and accessibility (IDEA) into all training materials as well as how to make workshops an inclusive and accessible environment through active allyship. During hands-on modules, attendees will examine case studies and evaluate their own teaching materials for unintentional biases. We intend this training to propagate down to lab members and trainees of CBW faculty, expanding awareness. Informed by TtT feedback collected from participants immediately after and 6-12 months post-training, we will write a paper detailing the contents and outcomes of this training to effectively share the resources developed.