Programming for Beginners (with MATLAB)

March 8 & 9
9 AM to 5 PM
G9.250A

This course would be useful for students with an interest in learning the most elementary steps in software programming. The course will use MATLAB as the programming platform, but the coding elements taught are fully agnostic to the programming language. The goal of the course is not to teach MATLAB, but to break down for the novice the mystery of coding and to illustrate the basic thinking behind structuring a set of instructions to produce something intelligible. Students will learn how to write and read simple codes and how to evaluate the progression of a program sequence, both numerically as well as through graphical representations of intermediate and final results. As a final project, students will have a choice of programming a classic algorithm for data clustering or a classic algorithm for the simulation of biochemical reactions.
Day 1: Elementary set of commands (ops on arrays/matrices; loops; decisions), Programming interface including debugging scripts vs functions; variable name space, Benchmark test: ability to read a piece of code
Day 2: Plotting including dynamic plots, Random number generation Example problem: calculate pi using a randomized 'droplet fall' on circular area, Benchmark tests for programming: k-means or Gillespie algorithms

Applications are open to any person at UTSW or in the surrounding community who are interested in basic programming.
Academic credit (1 credit hour) is available.

Registration closed. Decisions will be conferred via email.

For UTSW graduate students and trainees, academic credit (1 credit hour) is available.
Course number to register for UTSW grad students, if accepted into the nanocourse, is BME 5096-05 Special Topics - Programming for Beginners using MATLAB.
Course number to register for UTSW postdocs, if accepted into the nanocourse, is PDRT 5095-02 Special Topics - Programming for Beginners using MATLAB.

Lead Instructor: Qiongjing (Jenny) Zou

Other instructors: Gaudenz Danuser

Spring 2023

Single Cell Genomics

February 14 & 15
9 AM to 5 PM
G9.102

This course covers the basics of single-cell technologies and computational analysis. We will provide overviews and key algorithms for single-cell RNA-Seq, single-cell ATAC-Seq, and multiome analysis. This course includes hands-on practice to perform analyses from raw data to quality control, clustering, visualization, and trajectory inference. It also includes more advanced topics including multiome analysis, spatial transcriptomics, and single-cell perturbation. This course requires proficiency with R and Python.

Registration closed. Decisions will be conferred via email.

For UTSW graduate students and trainees, academic credit (1 credit hour) is available.
Course number to register for UTSW grad students, if accepted into the nanocourse, is BME 5096-06 Special Topics - Single Cell Genomics.
Course number to register for UTSW postdocs, if accepted into the nanocourse, is PDRT 5095-01 Special Topics - Single Cell Genomics.

Lead Instructor: Genevieve Konopka

Other instructors: Gary Hon, Tao Wang, Ashwinikumar Kulkarni