Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

As the recent global pandemic plays on and new outbreaks in dangerous pathogens emerge, we are learning how important it is for public health workers to be skilled in using computers to analyze data. Infectious disease researchers and workers worldwide continue to seek new computational skills to help with their research and public health efforts. This is a problem not unique to Canada and is equally critical in countries with fewer educational resources. However, acquiring the training and knowledge can be challenging because topic specific training programs are scarce. To address this issue, the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops (CBW) is seeking funding from CIHR to offer a 2-part in-person 'Infectious Disease Genomic Epidemiology' (IDGE) workshop. We are partnering with International Research Development Canada (IDRC) to enable low-middle income country (LMIC) participation. During this pair of 3-day IDGE workshops, participants will get intensive hands-on experience to learn concepts and tooling for foundational microbial bioinformatics and applied infectious disease genomic epidemiology. They will learn to analyze and process pathogen genomic data as well as how to combine it with contextual data to glean epidemiological insights. The 2-part workshop will cover various topics like high-throughput genomic sequencing data, antimicrobial resistance, and detecting emerging pathogens. These computational skills will have a direct impact on current public health efforts worldwide and will also support long-term infectious disease research for the betterment of public health in Canada.