ISCB Education Committee Seeks Input on Identifying a Consensus Bioinformatics Curriculum

Dear ISCB Members and Colleagues,

The ISCB Education Committee began working on a number of activities last fall related to developing recommendations for a bioinformatics curriculum. We have 3 subcommittees that are described below. A recap of this initiative can be found in the email included at the bottom of this message (dated September 14, 2011).

After completing an initial survey of the Education committee, we have drafted a manuscript that we would like to share with you. The manuscript is available on the blog mentioned below. We are interested in getting your comments on this draft. While we are soliciting feedback, we will continue to analyze the information we are collecting in our subcommittees and hope to incorporate this information in an updated document. We would be happy to have you join in this effort.

A blog has been set up to gather input: http://bioinfocurriculum.blogspot.com/. Login is not required.

We are particularly interested in hearing from you about:
1) ideas for publicizing these efforts and involving a broader cross-section of the computational biology community
2) the draft curriculum (a link to the document is provided on the blog page)
3) the plans to refine the curriculum (see the final paragraph of document)

To post your comments, you can click on the 'comment' link at the bottom of the blog. Please provide your comments by March 30th, 2012.

We are looking ahead to Long Beach and are organizing a Birds of a Feather (BoF) at ISMB 2012 to discuss bioinformatics curriculum guidelines (http://www.iscb.org/ismb2012-program/birds-of-a-feather). Perhaps you can join us in Long Beach to continue this discussion.

Thanks for your interest in this effort. We value your input.

Sincerely,
Fran Lewitter, Lonnie Welch and Russell Schwartz


SUBCOMMITTEE 1 (job opportunities):
Leader: Lonnie Welch
Members: Murlidharan Nair, Steve Jennings
Recent activity: review job postings on ISCB web site for skills required

SUBCOMMITTEE 2 (existing curricula):
Leader: Russell Schwartz
Members: Erik Bongcam-Rudloff, Celia van Gelder, Antoine H.C. van Kampen, Scott J. Emrich, Murlidharan Nair, Shifra Ben-Dor, Erich Baker
Recent Activity: review existing curricula at for Bioinformatics degree granting programs

SUBCOMMITTEE 3 (core facilities):
Leader: Fran Lewitter
Members: Erik Bongcam-Rudloff, Scott J. Emrich, Shifra Ben-Dor, Lakshmanan Iyer, Erich Baker, Winston Hide, Takis Benos
Recent Activity: survey bioinformatics core facility directors to regarding hiring practices

=======================
From: Welch, Lonnie
Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2011 10:56 PM
To: 'Fran Lewitter'; education
Subject: RE: ISCB Education Committee initiatives and minutes from 7/17/11 meeting

Dear Members of the ISCB Education Committee,

I would like to invite your participation in our committee's task force on curriculum.

During spring and summer of 2011, we constructed a straw man curriculum that is based on a survey of our committee and of the EMBnet community. The result of this effort is being written up in a report for the ISCB column in PLoS Computational Biology.

We plan to refine the curriculum via the following tasks:
1. Survey job opportunities (led by Lonnie Welch)
2. Survey existing curricula (led by Russell Schwartz)
3. Survey perspectives of Directors of Bioinformatics Core Facilities and biological researchers (led by Fran Lewitter)

We plan to perform the surveys during fall 2011 and to incorporate our findings into the EduComm bioinformatics curriculum during winter 2012.

Please let us know if you would like to be involved in this effort. In your reply, specify which of the 3 tasks interest you (feel free to select as many of the 3 as you wish).

Best regards,
Lonnie Welch
--
Lonnie R. Welch, Stuckey Professor
Director of the Bioinformatics Laboratory
School of Elec. Eng. & Computer Science,
Biomedical Engineering Program,
Molecular and Cellular Biology Program
Ohio University
Athens, Ohio 45701
740-593-1575 (office); 740-818-9521 (mobile)
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
www.ohio.edu/cidds/welch/