Title of talk- The NGS Bioinformatics Scientists: Building Expertise at a Primarily Undergraduate Institution by Dr. Nicole Garrison
Remarks of the Talk:-
-Bioinformatics: the missing link? – bottlenecks in data analysis, difficulty interpreting results, lack of bioinformatics expertise at faculty and graduate level
-Bioinformatics education challenges – lack of awareness at the undergraduate level, guided training unavailable or unapproachable, no career exposure, computer science, and statistics deter biology students
-Exploring potential solutions in two ways – demystify and empower and engage
-Approach adopted – K12 recruitment, enhanced research experiences, summer training opportunities
-Highlights of WV-INBRE summer bioinformatics Bootcamp
About Speaker:-
Dr. Nicole Garrison is currently an Assistant Professor of biology at West Liberty University in West Virginia and a member of the WV-INBRE Bioinformatics Core Facility. She earned a Ph.D. at Auburn University, AL working on the phylogenomics, transcriptomics, and systematics of spiders.
Her research utilizes a variety of next-generation sequencing technologies and involves the development of custom bioinformatic pipelines for a wide range of biological applications from conservation biology to evolutionary biology and biomedical research. The primary foci of her current position are aiding researchers in the pre-processing, analysis, and interpretation of their sequencing data and educating undergraduate students in bioinformatics methods and programming.