Two weeks ago, I ran a workshop at UC Davis on mRNAseq analysis for semi-model organisms, which focused on building new gene models ab initio -- with a reference genome. This was a milestone for me - the first time I taught a workshop at UC Davis as a professor there! My co-instructors were Tamer Mansour, a new postdoc in my lab, and Isabelle Laforest-Lapointe, a microbial ecologist visiting Jonathan Eisen's lab from Montreal - about whom more, later.

This is the third workshop in my planned workshop series -- the first workshop was a Software Carpentry instructor training workshop given by Greg Wilson and Tracy Teal, and the second was a Data Carpentry workshop given by Tracy Teal.

Tracy Teal will be running a one-day workshop in April, on mothur, and I will be giving a two-day workshop in early May (May 4-5), on de novo mRNAseq analysis, for transcriptome analysis in organisms without a reference genome. I will also be teaching at the MBL Microbial Diversity Course and attending the beginning of the MBL STAMPS course in Woods Hole. Finally, I will once again host the two week summer NGS course back in Michigan in August. Then, in September, I return to UC Davis and get to actually spin up my full workshop series -- these early ones are just tasters :).