The B&B Department is again hosting two very different educational offerings this summer. The first program, the Summer Institute for Training in Biostatistics (SIBS) program targets undergraduates and provides training in applied biostatistical methods and exposes students to graduate school and career options in the fields of biostatistics, statistics, and public health. The second is a High Throughput Sequencing Course designed for graduate students and postgraduate researchers from biological and quantitative disciplines such as mathematics, statistics and computer science.
For the SIBS program, Duke Biostatistics has partnered with NC State and hosts 20 undergraduates from all over the United States. It is sponsored by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences and designed to address a growing imbalance between the demand and supply for biostatisticians. SIBS includes case based instruction of real biomedical research; computer laboratory training; projects; and clinical and translational research enrichment activities. Coursework focuses on clinical trials, translational research and models used in the analysis of biomedical studies. Students are matched with a Biostatistics faculty member and graduate research assistant for their research projects. The projects gives students exposure and the opportunity to engage in medical science research through biostatistics. After a supervised research, trainees will present their accomplished projects to faculty and students.
The High Throughput Sequencing course teaches 25 students from Duke and around the country the next generation of scientists the biological, statistical, computational and informatics knowledge for implementing a well-designed genomics experiment. Due to the complexity of the genome and the vast quantities of data generated per experiment, making sense of genomic data poses unique statistical and computational challenges. The course includes a mixture of lectures, coding practice, focused case studies and laboratory sessions. This course has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative