Data science tools play an increasingly important role in advancing biomedical research at the University of Miami.  However, many faculty members and students need training or support to apply these powerful resources to their research studies.

To address this issue, the Frost Institute for Data Science and Computing (IDSC) is launching a Student Mentors program. The goal is to foster interdisciplinary research and grant collaborations, while bolstering professional training opportunities for data science students, according to Ravi Vadapalli, Ph.D., Director, IDSC Advanced Computing and Research Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering at the College of Engineering.

“IDSC Student Mentors will help
navigate Triton supercomputer-based
bioinformatics and biomedical applications”

“IDSC Student Mentors will support faculty, doctoral students, and other researchers who seek help in navigating UM’s Triton supercomputer-based bioinformatics and biomedical applications,” said Vadapalli. The student mentors will be guided by IDSC staff with expertise in advanced computing and data science tools and technologies. “This is a great opportunity to learn from each other and cross-pollinate research thinking in diverse bioscience and biomedical disciplines,” he added.

The University-wide mentoring program is an outgrowth of the well-received summer course, “Data Science for Bioinformatics,” offered in collaboration with the Miller School of Medicine. “There is a huge need for computational biology training of fellows, research staff, and faculty,” said Coleen Atkins, Ph.D., Associate Professor at The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, Department of Neurological Surgery at the Miller School. “Our researchers need to understand the methods for working with large data sets,” she said. “The IDSC Student Mentors program is the next step to broaden IDSC’s reach to graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and faculty who want to implement a data-rich process, such as a single-cell RNA-sequencing analysis.”

Vadapalli said many of the graduate students from the Data Science for Bioinformatics course wanted to continue working with UM’s Triton resources after completing their summer courses. “Now, they can serve as mentors, spending a few hours a week teaching new users and answering questions like, ‘How to do I use Jupyter notebook on Triton?’ ‘Why is my script not working?’ or ‘How do I use Python to prepare my dataset for analytics?’ to give just a few examples. It’s a professional development opportunity through IDSC for graduate students to become teachers and boost their own academic careers.”

To contact the IDSC Advanced Computing team and connect with a Student Mentor, email idsc@miami.edu or call 305.243.4962.