NGS Data Analysis Skills for the Biosciences Pipeline

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 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) is powering the field of Genomics and increasingly permeating all aspects of biosciences research and clinical practice. This development has triggered a huge need for data analysis skills among researchers and professionals. As biosciences graduate programs and also biomedical professional schools are rapidly adapting their curricula towards a greater emphasis on quantitative analysis skills, it has become apparent that the current pool of graduate and medical/pharmacy school applicants who have an understanding and hands-on experience in quantitative analysis of `omic datasets remains exceedingly shallow. Indeed, without prior computational biosciences research experience it is difficult to evaluate applicants for their aptitude in quantitative analysis skills. In this post-genome era of biosciences research, a lack o aptitude in quantitative analysis skills will hamper graduate students and biomedical researchers through their careers. The proposed research education plan is addressing this need by providing potential applicants of graduate and professional schools with a Summer Program focused on NGS data analysis and statistics, culminating in a capstone research project in the area of computational genomics to apply these skills and document proficiency. The proposed summer undergraduate summer course in hands-on computational genomics leverages existing infrastructure at UCLA's QCB Collaboratory and adapts and extends these to train both the likely applicants of graduate and biomedical professional schools, as well as the next generation of Big Data educator-scientists by training postdoctoral fellows in workshop teaching, and by disseminating the tools and infrastructure to other institutions.