Functional Genomics and Bioinformatics for Community College Faculty

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This professional development project is improving the instructional capabilities of community colleges in genomic technologies and bioinformatics. The project combines an intensive five-day workshop with a subsequent online course and industry internship. The project includes conducting five-day summer workshops for instructors to learn the basics of informatics and biological applications. The workshop participants then participate in a semester-long online class in the fall to further enhance their knowledge and comfort level with bioinformatics. The following spring, the faculty participates in internships inlocal labs to use their new skills, work with real-world data and applications of the new technology, and form relationships with local bioinformatics scientists. Project products are community college faculty highly trained and prepared to train students for jobs in bioinformatics, accessible, relevant, and easily updateable instructional materials, and relationships with local bioinformaticists to provide support and consultation.By training community college instructors, the project has a broad impact. Community colleges are the frontline of higher education and serve many more students than do four-year institutions, due to greater accessibility and lower costs. Through these instructors, we are impacting the greatest number of workforce-bound individuals possible. Based on class size at several community colleges, we estimate that this project is exposing an estimated 2,000 students to bioinformatics in a single school year. Courses, follow-up-services, instructional manuals and informational updates facilitate institutionalizing bioinformatics into the local community college curricula. We are targeting faculty from community colleges with proportionally higher populations of underrepresented groups. By training a cadre of faculty, this project is permanently impacting the capacity of the community colleges to teach bioinformatics, and create relationships among trained faculty, UC Davis personnel, and industry scientists.