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BIOINFORMATICS CURRICULUM
GUIDELINES AND CORE COMPETENCIES
By Lonnie Welch
The Curriculum Task Force of ISCB"s Education
Committee released a report in March 2014, detailing a set of
guidelines for bioinformatics educators. Rapid advances in the life
sciences and in related information technologies necessitate the
ongoing refinement of bioinformatics educational programs in order
to maintain their relevance.
As the discipline of
bioinformatics and computational biology expands and matures, it is
important to characterize the elements that contribute to the
success of professionals in this field. These individuals work in a
wide variety of settings, including bioinformatics core facilities,
and medical research laboratories, software development
organizations, pharmaceutical and instrument development companies,
and institutions that provide education, service, and training. In
response to this need, the Curriculum Task Force of the ISCB
Education Committee seeks to define curricular guidelines for those
who train and educate bioinformaticians.
The
bioinformatics literature provides valuable perspectives on
bioinformatics education by defining skill sets needed by
bioinformaticians, presenting approaches for providing informatics
training to biologists, and discussing the roles of bioinformatics
core facilities in training and education. The current report of the
Curriculum Task Force expands the body of knowledge by presenting
the results from a broad set of surveys (of core facility directors,
of career opportunities, and of existing curricula). The article
presents an initial set of core competencies that were derived from
the surveys, and relates the competencies to three different
categories of bioinformatics training.
The Curriculum Task
Force is currently focusing on implementation and refinement of its
curriculum guidelines. An open forum Birds of a Feather session will
be held at ISMB 2014, on Tuesday July 15, 2014 at 12:45 p.m.
Read the full article: Citation: Welch L,
Lewitter F, Schwartz R, Brooksbank C, Radivojac P, et al. (2014)
Bioinformatics Curriculum Guidelines: Toward a Definition of Core
Competencies. PLoS Comput Biol 10(3): e1003496.
doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003496.
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