This class is designed to inspire students in the life sciences to see the power of Computational Biology in advancing fundamental research. The course will initially be team-taught by experts in diverse applications of Computational Biology, with each sharing the excitement of making clear to students how the introduction of computational approaches has been transformative in their field. The course will also teach many fundamental skills in manipulating large data sets, including genome sequences, functional genomic data, images, protein structures, etc. The course will consist of two lectures each week and one practical exercise session each week. In the practicals, students will learn the use of many of the latest software tools, and will develop some basic programming skills. Students will learn essential problem solving skills in several aspects of genome analysis, and modeling in neurobiology, ecology, physiology and evolution. This will prepare them for future courses in these more focused biological areas covering specific applications of computer programming as well as use of specialized software tools. Students will be able to explore their own specific interests in greater depth on a term project.

Computational Infrastructure

The computational infrastructure for this class was designed to seamlessly scale from 50 to 200 students at no cost to the university. JupyerHub was selected as a the scientific gateway in order to provide a uniform graphical interface that reflects current best-pracitices in the field of bioinformatics. HPC server support was provided free of charge through the NSF-funded ACCESS initiative. The NCSA-supported CILogon iniative provided federated credentially for students to login to the server using their existing NetID eliminating the need for instructors to perform user-management.

• Science Gateway provided through JupyterHub support: https://tljh.jupyter.org/en/latest/
• HPC compute provided through JetStream2 - ACCESS: https://access-ci.org/
• Federated ID provided through CILogon: https://www.cilogon.org/home