The course will cover the biology, assays, online resources, bioinformatics pipelines and statistical methods needed to understand the analysis and interpretation of the results. This two-week course will be held May 13 – May 24, 2024. This is the fourth year of a five-year training program funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The course will be in a virtual format.
The first week of the course will consist of preparatory material, and the second week will focus on an assay-specific sequence. The preparatory sequence will be devoted to teaching the fundamental elements and principles of the microbiome, cancer immunology, computing and statistics needed to prepare students to engage in bioinformatics analysis of high-throughput data. The week-two, assay-specific sequence will be devoted to teaching the requisite methodology and tools for conducting in depth analysis, from start to finish, of Whole-Exome DNA-Seq (germline and somatic variant calling and annotation, HLA-typing, neo-epitope prediction). Each year, the course focuses on a different assay (2025: TCR-Seq). Course participants are encouraged, but not required, to attend the course over multiple years.
The course will teach best practices in reproducible analysis and provide hands-on practice needed to master performing the requisite analyses. The courses will be self-contained, in that no specialized background in biology, statistics or bioinformatics is assumed, although participants are expected to be sufficiently motivated to learn challenging interdisciplinary material.
There are no fees for attending the course since it is funded by a grant from the NCI. Because of this funding, accepted participants will be asked to formally affirm their commitment to attend the course in its entirety.
We especially welcome applications by individuals from groups historically underrepresented in science.
The online application for the course is currently open. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.
For additional information, please see the following:
If you have any questions, please contact the program administrator by email (miccourse@duke.edu)
