The CRN GSA presents:
Getting Started in R
A 4-workshop series for life science researchers and trainees
About the Workshop
What this is: a hands-on series aimed at helping people get up and running in R so that they get familiar with the language, and know how to access additional resources to continue learning on their own
What this is not: a statistics class; a thorough introduction to programming
The Details
Time: 11am-1pm, with free catered lunch included.
Dates: each Monday of October, except Thanksgiving
Place: Montreal General Hospital, room L7-140
Format:
- ~ 1 hour of teaching & coding along with instructors
- Break for lunch (provided)
- ~ 30min to 1 hour to try out code, with the instructors on hand to help
Program overview
| Week | COURSE Content |
|---|---|
| Week 1 (October 1st): The basics |
-Installation and setting up; tour of RStudio -How to get help in R -Literate programming with R Markdown (how to organize code, and where to write and execute it) -Programming essentials: data structures (vectors, lists, data frames) and functions -Getting tabular data into R |
| Week 2 (October 15th): Data exploration and analysis |
- Introduction to the tidyverse -The pipe operator -Intro to an ecosystem of packages which facilitate data exploration and analysis -Key “verbs” in R for slicing and dicing data from the dplyr package including filter, arrange, mutate, summarise |
| Weeks 3 (October 22nd) and 4 (October 29th): Mini-data projects | - In each of the last two workshops, we will walk through a mini-project where we ask a question about our data, prepare and clean the data, perform a simple analysis, and visualize the results using the ggplot2 package, a powerful plotting tool for R |
What to bring:
- Your laptop
- The practice dataset that will be used during the workshop (the link to download this dataset will be sent by email following registration)
- Optional: A tabular dataset from your own research data in CSV format i.e. a dataset with several variables for several observations, that would fit into an Excel table. If you bring your own data, you can answer questions during the workshop that are interesting and useful to you!
In preparation:
- Install R and RStudio by following Steps 1 and 2 here; we will dedicate some time to make sure everyone is set up during the first workshop, so no worries if you run into trouble
- Install the tidyverse package
- We will assume attendants have little to no programming experience, so all are welcome!
- That being said, we encourage you to give R a try prior to the workshops:
- Follow Steps 3-6 here and work through the tutorial
- Work through this excellent data science resource
Instructors: Selin Jessa and Alex Diaz-Papkovich
Selin is a 1st-year PhD student in Quantitative Life Sciences at McGill, working with Dr. Claudia Kleinman at the Lady Davis Institute. She has been programming in R for the last three years, through functional genomics research projects related to cancer, neuroscience, and brain development. Selin has developed and published bioinformatics software in R and maintains a set of resources for reproducible research in R.
Alex is a second year PhD student in Quantitative Life Sciences at McGill, working under the supervision of Dr. Simon Gravel at the McGill University and Genome Quebec Innovation Centre. He is an instructor for EPIB 613, Intro to statistical software, and has used R over the years for a variety of purposes including data visualization, statistical modelling, data mining, and sports analytics.
Registration
Attendance is free, but registration is required due to limited space. To register, please click here.
For questions, please email marie.st-laurent [at] mail.mcgill.ca (Marie St-Laurent).
Acknowledgements
This workshop series is made possible thanks to the generosity of Dr. Albert Aguayo and the Aguayo training fund!