Have you heard of the human genome project? Did you know that genetic sequencing is becoming more and more common? With three billion base pairs being present in the human genome, you may have wondered, “How on earth do scientists analyze all of that data?!” or “Is that even useful?” Well, it is! There have been some pretty impressive advances in biology thanks to genetic sequencing, there are even FDA-approved drugs that consider a patient’s genomic information. Would you believe me if I told you that you can perform some of these analyses from your own computer? Computational techniques have become indispensable to biology with the advent of high-throughput sequencing and many techniques and data sources are openly available for public use on the internet. In this course, we will go on a brief tour of where some tools and data sources for computational biology live on the internet. We will go through tutorials on any tools introduced and look at data in cancer and even from the 2014 ebola virus outbreak. There is no coding required for this course, not even a computer! Some biology may help, but is also certainly not required. Any websites visited or materials discussed will be shared with students, so we can spend ample time discussing cool science!

Are you tired from staying up all night completing your problem sets and lab reports? Have you ever wanted to learn how to write a screenplay? In this three hour workshop, you will learn how to and write two short screen plays. All the while, we will discuss how science and storytelling benefit one another. (And I do not mean how awesome science fiction is)