NCI/ Intersect Training Partnership – What do attendees think?

Janil Perez
20 Mar 2023

Series 5 – Talk to Dr. Yanran Zhao from the University of New South Wales

By Jianzhou Zhao

Following the success of the 2022 Training Program, Intersect and NCI commenced the 2023 Training Program in February. To date, we have delivered three hands-on training courses on programming languages; all of which have been well received by the attendees. We continue to meet the training attendees regularly to hear their feedback on the training program. Last month, we had a conversation with Dr Yanran Zhao, who is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Kirby Institute of the University of New South Wales. 

Yanran is leading the cellular and molecular immunovirology research projects which focus on investigating human CD8 T cell response against RNA viruses including hepatitis C and SARS-CoV-2. In order to process the single-cell RNAseq data with bioinformatic analysis, Yanran firstly attended our introductory R and Python courses, and then followed the common learning pathway of attending the Unix and High Performance Computing courses. 

“Unlike other free training online, Intersect/NCI courses are well-organised and the training material, in particular, is developed at a level that accommodates researchers from different research domains and disciplines. I found the courses easy to follow and studying with other students at the same time is a fantastic experience.”

It is very encouraging to hear that as a result of attending our training program, Yanran now have a deeper understanding and there can collaborate with researchers from other research groups, who have a computer science background. Yanran also pointed out that the knowledge she acquired has supported her research workflow – she can now run and edit the analysis pipeline (developed by a bioinformatician who has subsequently left the group) on her data,  and more importantly, modified this current pipeline to accommodate  a different data set analysis, taking advantage of NCI HPC resources. 

“Online learning videos, like LinkedIn, are highly accessible but when you are actually watching and following the steps, it can be annoying when things like the software environment issues happen. In Intersect/NCI courses, it’s always helpful that the instructors can solve these problems on the spot.”

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