Coding for Medicine for High School
Prepare for STEM education beyond high-school
Explore the living world integrating biology with coding, math and chemistry!
Coding For Medicine INVITED SUMMER Talk August 14, 2024
The 2024 Invited Summer Talk will be delivered via Zoom by Nithish Narasimman on August 14, Wednesday, 6-7 pm PST (8-9 pm CST/9-10 pm EST).There will be Q&A at the end.
Title: DISCOVERING and DEVELOPING COMPUTATION FOR BIOLOGY
In order to receive the Zoom access, please register here. The zoom link will be sent to your contact email.
Prior Event: Coding For Medicine Research Talk April 21, 2024
(Please ask for recording, if interested)
The 2024 student research talk was delivered via Zoom by high schoolers Sean Pham, Richa Jayanti, Anish Sharma, Andrew Kim and Athreya Ragavhan on April 21, Sunday, 4-5 pm PST (6-7 pm CST/7-8 pm EST).
Title: Exploring Plant Diversity and Evolution using Genetic Tools
Please request at info@coding4medicine.com for video recording.
MAJOR NEWS/UPDATES FOR 2024
1. In-person coding classes at the Bellevue College will continue like last year after the hiatus during the pandemic. Our online classes will also continue so that the students from around the country can join. This year, we will also offer two lab modules, namely "Learning Chemistry from Enzymes" covering chemistry concepts based on biochemical molecules and "Microbial Mysteries" teaching the techniques of biotechnology lab and using them to explore the microbial world.
2. This summer we will again offer the summer-long independent research program in the same manner as last year. Once again, this module will have both classes covering predetermined topics and summer-long open-ended independent research. For the research module, we plan to have a small group of students selected based on merit and genuine interest. Please contact us for more details.
3. The students of our 2023 summer research program applied a newly published bioinformatics tool PGR-TK on plastids and reported their results in the paper "Comparative Analysis of Plastid Genomes Using Pangenome Research ToolKit (PGR-TK)". Dr. Jason Chin, who led the development of PGR-TK and its application in human genome, referred to this work and said in his tweet - "Yes, with the right tools, high school students can have the first hand experience analyzing genomics too.".
4. Coding for Medicine clubs are expanding rapidly. In 2020, Leo Zou and Athulya Saravanakumar, our students from the Dulles High School in Sugarland, TX, started a Coding for Medicine club at their school. Today five more student-run Coding for Medicine clubs are operational in various high shcools, and several more clubs formed by students from our summer program are in their planning stages. If you are interested in starting a Coding for Medicine club at your school, let us discuss.
5. Under the guidance of Dr. Samanta, our members from the Coding for Medicine club at Dulles High Schools completed a yearlong research project analyzing the chloroplast genomes of parasitic plants. Their findings are summarized in this paper.
6. Anne Gvozdjak, your favorite teaching assistant from the online classes of 2020, joined MIT in the fall of 2021 and is now in her third year. Anne was not only our student at Coding for Medicine, but she performed excellent research for two years under the supervision of Dr. Samanta and reported the findings in this paper. Anne graduated from Bellevue High School, Bellevue, WA.
About us
Coding for Medicine is an education organization uniquely positioned at the forefront of bioinformatics education in the life sciences.
Rapid technological advancements are creating many avenues to run high-throughput experiments in the life sciences at approachable costs and are generating massive datasets as a result. This has already revolutionized DNA sequencing making genomics and transcriptomics experiments routine for probing biological and clinical questions more than ever before. However, the integration of such tremendously powerful tools has unwittingly created a serious challenge. The analysis of massive datasets has been slow due to a general lack of programming and computational skills among life scientists.
No longer is the outsourcing of bioinformatic analysis to centralized core facilities helpful for conducting research at the cutting-edge. All such centers are over-burdened and can only use generic software to analyze data. Such software fail in the realm of specific scientific problems. It is impossible for any center personnel to provide insight from your data without truly giving time to understand your scientific question.
Our mission is to demystify bioinformatics and simplify the challenge to learn coding for the biologist. Using our comprehensive collection of tutorials and trainings that comes with excellent support and at affordable prices, any biologist anywhere can harness the power of the data!
JOIN THE GENOMICS REVOLUTION
Dramatic drop in DNA sequencing costs since the human genome project is revolutionizing biology and medicine. Tomorrow's doctors will need to have computational expertise to understand the genomic data, whereas tomorrow's computer scientists will find developing bioinformatics algorithms as their most exciting challenge. You get a glimpse of these advances by following the science of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Everything from developing rapid testing to tracing the global spread of the disease utilizes the genome sequence of the virus.
Coding for Medicine, in collaboration with Coding for Life Science, takes you to the center of that revolution. You will see how the worlds of computer scientists and medical doctors are merging together. We developed a set of courses to give young students the right skills to contribute to this fast-changing scientific world.
Here are our larger objectives.
1. The living world is vast and full of mysteries. We like to generate interests among the budding scientists like you about the scientifically unexplored corners of the living world,
2. Research in life sciences and medicine has become computer-intensive. We show you how to think using computers to solve such problems,
3. We show you how to find open-source codes and biological data and teach you to use efficient collaborative tools like git/github. These skills are relevent for all areas of computing and not just life sciences.
Check here for our other activities.
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Lab - Learning Chemistry from Enzymes
The living world and the biological materials in it have been possible because of the presence of a set of proteins called enzymes. Enzymes are biocatalysts. Without them, none of the biochemical transformations will be possible and there would be no life! Indeed nature is the best chemist and exploring how enzymes work is helping chemists to understand catalysis. Enzymes accelerate biochemical reactions at tremendous speeds such as 10^17 and with high specificity and 100% yields. Incorporating more and more enzymes into our daily lives such as in manufacturing of fine chemicals, pharmaceutical products, water treatment facilities, daily chores, recycling of plastics etc holds the key to sustainable living.
In this laboratory course we will learn the fundamentals of chemistry through the execution of enzyme-catalyzed reactions. This will help us to reduce the risk of using hazardous chemicals and generating toxic wastes. Enzyme-catalyzed reactions use water as the solvent.
Be ready to dive into a world of chemical jargon such as molarity, moles, pH, buffer, concentration, kinetics, rate, chemical names, Lambert-Beer’s law etc. etc. You will also learn hands-on skills like micro-pipetting, making buffers and solutions, protein estimation assay, protein enrichment via chromatography, protein gel analysis and a lot of spectroscopy! You will leave with an appreciation of the world of atoms and the confidence to tackle college chemistry!
This in-person lab will be held at the Bellevue College.
Price
$625 (Bring a friend and earn an additional *shared* 10% discount (5% each person))
Choice of Sessions
1. Aug 12-16 (10AM-3PM PST)
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Online, Instructor-led - Introductory Coding for Medicine
This hands on module introduces you to the Python programming language through a series of problem solving exercises. Additionally, you learn about the Linux operating system, where to get publicly available genomic data and NCBI BLAST search engine for DNA sequences.
Just like last year, our this year's theme is coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). You will download its publicly available DNA sequences and write code to analyze it.
Price
$345 (Bring a friend and earn an additional *shared* 10% discount (5% each person))
Choice of Sessions
1. Aug 19-23, 26-30 (10AM-12 noon PST)
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Online - Year-long self-directed module
This module helps you learn coding and biology with a new problem every month.
At the beginning of each month (depending on you starting date), you will receive problems in one of the two categories (i) a single-concept, (ii) research-type.
We will post both problems in text and video forms at the beginning of the month and post the solutions at the end of the month. You can work on the questions during the month, and if you need help, you can communicate with us using the classroom chat. Moreover, we will arrange two zoom meetings every month with all students together to discuss various questions.
Price
$199
Choice of Sessions
year-long
Register
These registrations do not require any payment, and you register to only reserve your priority in the queue. After you register, we will send you payment link by private email.