We are delighted to announce that Code for Science and Society has selected our application for their first cohort of Event Fund grant recipients as announced on January 25, 2021. The CS&S Event Fund program is made possible through award number GBMF8449 from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (https://doi.org/10.37807/GBMF8449).
Thanks to this support, CDSB along with the Mexican Bioinformatics Network (RMB in Spanish) and the National Node of Bioinformatics at UNAM (NNB-CCG) will be able to carry out a series of short courses throughout 2021 (including one event from December 2020) that will end with the National Bioinformatics Meeting 2021 that will be composed of 6 week-long courses.
By Erick Cuevas Fernández, M. Sc., Bioinformatician. Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Morelos. Systems Biology and Translational Medicine Laboratory. @ErickCuevasF
In 2018 I heard of a workshop where Martin Morgan was performing in Mexico, at that time I had only a few months learning to use R, and I did not know who Martin Morgan was and had vague notions of Bioconductor. That year I started taking the international bioinformatics workshops.
This blog post was submitted to the R Consortium blog where it was published on 03/18/2020.
I have been attending R conferences since 2008, and while I’ve seen the R community grow rapidly, I generally don’t encounter as many Latin Americans (LatAm) among communities of R developers. Traditionally, a lab lead investigator invested in R or Bioconductor would teach their trainees and students these skills, becoming a local R hotspot. However, that scenario is uncommon in Mexico for several reasons.
A couple years ago we started the Community of Bioinformatics Software Developers (CDSB in Spanish) as because we were concerned with the very low representation of Latin Americans in the Bioconductor community, and the R community in general. For the full story check this this blog post.
Since we started CDSB, part of our goal been to help Bioconductor users transition into developers. To achieve this, we organized one week long courses in Mexico at low cost during the summers of 2018 and 2019 in partnership with the TIBs leadership (NNB-UNAM) and RMB.
Last year the Community of Bioinformatics Software Developers (CDSB in Spanish) organized a one week workshop designed to train R users how to write R packages and ideally contribute them to Bioconductor. The workshop itself was a success as described in our summary post about the event. However, we didn’t want to stop there. We formed CDSB and teamed up with TIB (“Talleres Internacionales de Bioinformática”) from NNB-UNAM with the goal of simulating the BioC yearly meeting where attendees can learn R, mature as R users and become R developers.