Enrolling Now: Summer Bioinformatics Short-Course In Microbiome Immunology Cancer (MIC)

This is the third 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 microbiome sequence data (16S amplicon and shotgun). In future years, the course will focus on other assays (2024: Whole-Exome DNA-Seq, 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 from women, individuals from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, individuals with disabilities or individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Applications for the course are currently being accepted on a rolling basis at Duke Qualtrics.

For additional information, please visit the MIC webpage.