Coding for Medicine for High School
Prepare for STEM education beyond high-school
Explore the living world integrating biology with coding, math and chemistry!
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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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 ($99 - 50% discount before 3/1/2024)
Choice of Sessions
year-long
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Online, Instructor-led - Data Science Concepts through Coding
These days, all areas of science and technology require skills in analyzing large volume of data generated from high-throughput experiments. Data science is an emerging field at the intersection of computing, statistics and basic sciences. In this module, you will take your first dive into data science.
You will learn to use R programming language and apply it to understand the basic statistical concepts through simulated experiments.
Price
$345 (Bring a friend and earn an additional *shared* 10% discount (5% each person))
Choice of Sessions
1. Aug 5-9, 12-16 (4-6PM PST)
2. Aug 19-23, 26-30 (1-3PM 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. Jun 17-21, 24-28 (4-6PM PST)
2. Jun 17-21, 24-28 (10AM-12 noon PST)
3. Jul 15-19, 22-26 (1-3PM PST)
4. Aug 5-9, 12-16 (10AM-12 noon PST)
5. Aug 19-23, 26-30 (10AM-12 noon PST)
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In person - 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
$525 (Bring a friend and earn an additional *shared* 10% discount (5% each person))
Choice of Sessions
1. Jul 8-12 (10AM-3PM PST)
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Online, Instructor-led - Intermediate Coding for Medicine
In this hands on programming course, you will use your Python coding skills to explore genome sequences and find key genes, learn how to develop computer algorithms to analyze genomes and see the big picture of where the new cutting-edge jobs are created for the 21st century.
After starting with the small coronavirus genome, you will explore the human genome to find information.
Price
$345 (Bring a friend and earn an additional *shared* 10% discount (5% each person))
Choice of Sessions
1. Jun 17-21, 24-28 (1-3PM PST)
2. Aug 5-9, 12-16 (1-3PM PST)
3. Aug 19-23, 26-30 (1-3PM PST)
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In person - Intermediate Coding for Medicine
In this hands on programming course, you will use your Python coding skills to explore genome sequences and find key genes, learn how to develop computer algorithms to analyze genomes and see the big picture of where the new cutting-edge jobs are created for the 21st century.
After starting with the small coronavirus genome, you will explore the human genome to find information.
Price
$525 (Bring a friend and earn an additional *shared* 10% discount (5% each person))
Choice of Sessions
1. Jul 29-Aug 2 (10AM-3PM PST)
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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. Jul 29-Aug2 (10AM-3PM PST)
1. Aug 12-16 (10AM-3PM PST)
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Lab - Microbial Mysteries
There is a vast untapped microbial world around us. So far our discoveries have merely scratched its surface. Large-scale genomic sequencing is providing us the opportunity of probing this world at a depth and scale never before possible.
Microbial Mysteries- a laboratory course will teach the students the skills and techniques of the biotechnology laboratory and how to use them to explore the microbial world. From learning to use the micropipettor and microscope students will grow and culture bacteria, extract genomic DNA, use PCR to amplify DNA and read sequence data.
This in-person lab will be held at the Bellevue College. We need minimum 10 students to run a lab course. Please bring your friends and share a 10 % discount (5% each person). All lab courses will run at Bellevue College.
Price
$625 (Bring a friend and earn an additional *shared* 10% discount (5% each person)
Choice of Sessions
1. Jun 24-28 (10AM-3PM PST)
2. Jul 15-19 (10AM-3PM PST)
3. Aug 5-9 (10AM-3PM PST)
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Online, Instructor-led - Advanced Coding for Medicine and Summer Research
This summer-long module will allow you to read scientific publications and perform independent research in bioinformatics. Our this year's theme is genome and gene evolution. We previously worked with a number of high school students on this topic. This year we will continue to build on top of what they developed.
Over the years, we experimented with a number of approaches for this advanced module including two-week classroom-type sessions with pre-determined content more advanced than the intermediate modules or open-ended research sessions over the whole summer. Both approaches had their shortcomings, and therefore this time, we plan to take a hybrid approach.
There will be both sub-components - (A) (online) classroom sessions with pre-determined content for two weeks of the summer, and (B) open-ended independent research for the entire summer with the guidance from an instructor. In this later subcomponent, the students will be working indepedently with guidance from an instructor and meetings throughout the summer.
You are required to complete the intermediate module before joining this module. Also, because of the time commitment from both the students and the instructor, the class size is extremely limited, and the students will be selected based on merit and interest.
Price
$595
Choice of Sessions
Entire summer, includng predetermined classes for two weeks
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.