Training

CGEBM 2024/25 Workshop Series

Our workshops are open to internal and external delegates from all research communities, including academia, SME and commercial organisations. 

The dates for the 2024/25 workshops are detailed below. Further course details, including costs and course descriptions, are provided via the embedded link for each course. Please ensure your place is confirmed before booking travel. If you have any queries, please contact CGEBM. These courses will be delivered on our Foresterhill campus (Polwarth building, Computer room 3), unless otherwise stated, by our expert CGEBM bioinformaticians.

Frequently Asked Questions:

• I have no coding experience. Can I take your courses?
  • Without coding experience, you can take three of our courses. The first, 'Introduction to Unix and HPC', is designed to provide the grounding in coding that you need to use our high-performance computer systems and is a prerequisite for our 'Quality Control of Sequencing Data', 'Genome Assembly and Annotation', 'RNA-seq and Differential Expression', and 'Alignment, Visualisation and Variant Calling' courses. Two other courses, 'Microbial Community Analysis' and 'Plotting with R and ggplot2' do not involve the computer cluster but teach some fundamental aspects of coding in the R statistical language.
• I just missed the registration deadline for a course. Can I still take it?
  • Please email Louie van de Lagemaat to check if late registration is available. This depends on whether there is time to set up any required computer account for you.
• How do I pay for a course?
  • University of Aberdeen delegates, please raise an internal requisition to supplier Centre for Genome-Enabled Biology and Medicine (CGEBM, supplier ID 89999876). On each line in the item description box, state the name and date of a CGEBM workshop and the delegate’s name. Use account code 3902.
  • External delegates, please raise a purchase order to supplier University of Aberdeen stating the CGEBM workshop and your name, marked FAO: Lynne Lumsden.  On each line in the item description box, please state the name and date of a CGEBM workshop and the delegate’s name. Please include VAT on your PO. For queries about VAT exemption, please contact Lynne Lumsden. When the PO has been received, an invoice will be raised and VAT will be applied according to the applicable rate. Please email a copy of your PO or your PO number to Lynne Lumsden. Use account code: 1301.
• Does my payment have to be fully processed to register for a course?
  • No, as long as you have raised a requisition number, just provide that or the internal order number in your registration form.
• I want to take a course, but I cannot raise a requisition number. Can I take the course?
  • Please email Louie van de Lagemaat, copying your supervisor who will need to approve spending these funds.
• My analysis, learned on a course, doesn't run on the cluster.
  • Did you remember to load the software module first? This is done using the command module load <software>, which makes the software available to your scripts. <software> is the name of the software you will use, including version number.
  • To find software, use the command module spider <partial-software-name> to list all versions of the software available on the HPC.
  • Sometimes IT will have updated the software to a new and different version. If after consulting the software help you are still having problems with a new software version, report this to the Computer Service Desk so they can investigate and hopefully resolve your issue. In the meantime, you may need to use the previous/older version of the software that you used on the course.
• Can I get help with my own analysis after a course?
  • Unfortunately, as a small team supporting a high volume of funded research projects, teaching and training, we can’t provide one-on-one training. It’s best to review the course materials and use the provided code/scripts on your own data, ideally soon after the course. Modify the scripts by changing input file names, locations, and parameters as needed. Use the course materials to understand and adjust the scripts accordingly.
  • If you are still finding your analysis challenging/problematic, please contact us to discuss options for a low-cost short-term analysis contract either to help you troubleshoot your analysis or to perform the analysis for you.
• I would like to take a course that is not available above.
  • If you would like to attend any of our previous workshops that are not currently scheduled, please email CGEBM to express your interest. These may be delivered again if there is sufficient demand. You can find these detailed in the panel below.