Mission
Core Principles
The Bioinformatics and Genomics program instills a high level of scientific integrity among its graduate students. This training helps students to grow into scientists of the highest caliber who are well-respected in their fields. Specifically, students in the program are expected to produce research that is:
- Transparent: All steps in data acquisition, processing, and analysis must be clearly described using documented methods and freely available tools.
- Reproducible: All steps in data acquisition, processing, and analysis must be repeatable by second parties, and must generate equivalent results.
- Statistically Sound: Results must be reached by means of sound and appropriate statistical methodology.
- Robust: Results must be robust to arbitrary choices in the data acquisition, processing, and analysis pipeline.
- Efficient: Computational and statistical tools intended for community use must be optimized for running time and memory usage.
- Valid: Conclusions drawn from results must improve our understanding of processes and mechanisms, thus yield biological insights. Conclusions also must be amenable to experimental validation in biological systems.
Training Areas
A set of courses and training activities are designed to train students in the following areas:
- Foundations of genomics, molecular genetics
- Sequencing technologies, genome assembly, alignments, read mapping
- Programming and scripting for bioinformatics
- Algorithm development in bioinformatics
- Applied statistics, and statistical methods for “-omics” data
- Competence in statistical software such as R
- Transcriptome analyses and techniques (microarray, RNA-seq)
- Comparative genomics, molecular evolution, function inferred from signatures of negative and positive selection
- Finding and functional analysis of protein-coding genes
- Genome variation, mutagenesis, connections to phenotypes
- Genome mapping, Mendelian inheritance of genes and DNA markers