The project themed “Empowering researchers with skills and tools in Open Science and Bioinformatics”, is a series of events which include open science symposium, bioinformatics workshops, instructors training, hackathons for collaborative mini-projects, and a conference. The series of events aims to blend open science and Bioinformatics, to train researchers to conduct open, reproducible, and collaborative science. These will ultimately produce a pool of students, lecturers, and early career researchers, who can conduct and lead open bioinformatics research, as well as be change-makers in their communities.
The event aims to sensitize the participants on FAIR open data science practices such as project planning and organization, collaboration, licensing, data sharing, among others, and expose them to use open science tools that facilitate these practices. See this page for more information.
The aim of the workshops is to teach bioinformatics skills from beginner to advanced applications. They will first introduce beginners to basic bioinformatics skills such as basics to Unix, introduction to sequencing technologies, and more. This will be followed by intermediate training including tasks such as RNAseq analysis, variant calling, phylogeny, and more. The next training will involve training on genomic data analysis using R and Python.
The instructor training program aims to train those interested in becoming trainers. They’ll be taken through best teaching practices and tools, and how to form communities.
These will include projects that will allow our participants to practice the skills gained through the workshops and training. They get to put their creativity and knowledge to practice by reproducing works done by other researchers.
This will be the culmination of the events, with our participants getting to present their work to the members of the communities, participants of all the events, facilitators, and speakers. There will be talks from different speakers, researchers, and partners.
Although the project targets the field of Bioinformatics, contributions from any field are welcome. You can participate in a number of ways, including:
- You are familiar with open science tools (Git and GitHub, Linux Commandline, Jupyter Notebooks, RMarkdown and Notebooks) and would like to contribute to training materials
- You are a Bioinformatics student, or enthusiasts, and would like to participate in our workshops and/or hackathons or miniprojects and conference
Participation application forms for each event will be posted before each event.
For questions, suggestions or to participate, reach us via:
Twitter: @BioinfoHub_KE or @OpenScienceKE
Email: info@bhki.org or kenyabioinformaticsnetwork@gmail.com
We hereby acknowledge the funding for this project from code for science and society through the Event Fund grant.
The host institution for this project and collaborating organizations ICIPE, and H3ABioNet
This project has been a collaboration.