Training
The Bioinformatics Core offers courses throughout the year. Many of them are classroom-based courses delivered in collaboration with the University’s Bioinformatics Training Facility, with a focus on hands-on, practical learning.
Upcoming Courses
The Bioinformatics Core members run or teach the following training courses.
Lent and Easter Terms 2026
| Course | Dates | Venue | Booking Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bulk RNA-seq analysis | 15,26 and 19 January 2026 | Research Informatics Training Room, Craik-Marshall Building | Book CI staff will get early access to this course via email. |
| Managing bioinformatics software and pipelines | 3 February 2026 | Research Informatics Training Room, Craik-Marshall Building | Book CI staff will get early access to this course via email. |
| Single-cell RNA-seq analysis | 9,16 and 23 February 2026 | Online | Book CI staff will get early access to this course via email. |
| Fixed and Mixed effects models | 16 February 2026 | CRUK CI (Internal) | Advertisement in January, and book via registration form |
| Generalised linear models | 11 and 13 February 2026 | Online | Book |
| Data analysis in R | 25 and 26 February 2026 | Online | Book |
| bite-sized R | March/April 2026 | CRUK CI (Internal) | Advertisement in February, and book via registration form |
| Data analysis in Python | 5 and 6 March 2026 | Research Informatics Training Room, Craik-Marshall Building | Book |
| Bulk RNA-seq analysis | 25,26 and 27 March 2026 | Research Informatics Training Room, Craik-Marshall Building | Book CI staff will get early access to this course via email. |
| Single-cell RNA-seq analysis | 16,17 and 20 April 2026 | Online | Book CI staff will get early access to this course via email. |
| Data analysis in R | 17 and 20 April 2026 | Online | Book |
| Introduction to Experimental design | May 2026 | CRUK CI (Internal) | Advertisement in April, and book via registration form |
| Bulk RNA-seq analysis | 11,14 and 18 May 2026 | Online | Book CI staff will get early access to this course via email. |
| Working on HPC clusters | 29 and 30 June 2026 | Research Informatics Training Room, Craik-Marshall Building | Book |
Clicking on the links will take you to a registration page. Courses without a booking link are not yet open for registration. These courses are generally popular so book up as early as possible. If a course is already fully booked, it is possible to add yourself to a waiting list from the booking page.
Please contact Chandra Chilamakuri for more information on our training courses.
Bioinformatics Training Facility at the Department of Genetics
Many of our courses are part of the programme run by the University of Cambridge Bioinformatics Training Facility located in the Craik-Marshall Building at the Department of Genetics.
A full listing of upcoming bioinformatics training courses available under this programme can be found using the following link.
Bioinformatics Training Facility Course Timetable
- Registration Fees:
- Free for registered University of Cambridge PhD students, but see non-attendance below.
- £60 per day for all University of Cambridge staff including postdocs; these charges are recovered at the departmental or institutional level.
- CRUK CI staff only: the institute no longer covers the cost of registration fees, these are now cross-charged to your group budget or a grant cost code (let the finance team know if you want the latter).
- Please cancel your booking if you are unable to attend as this will free up a space for someone on the waiting list.
- There is a penalty fee of £20 per day for non-attendance of students that will be charged to your responsible department or you personally should the department
- Further details of the charging policy can be found here
Course Index and Materials
Here is a list of courses that the Bioinformatics Core has created or contributed to. For additional information about these courses, please contact Chandra Chilamakuri.
Introductory
- An Introduction to Statistics
- Introduction to Experimental Design
- R crash course
- R basics (whistle-stop tour of some of the more common functions in R for manipulating and visualizing data)
- R for Cancer Scientists (longer form R course run over 6 weeks/sessions)
- Introduction to solving biological problems with Python
- Basic Unix
- Managing your Research Data
- Avoiding data disasters
- Making the most of mRNA sequencing experiments at CRUK-CI
- An Introduction to Genome Browsers
- Introduction to IGV (Introducing the Integrative Genomics Viewer for visualising Next Generation Sequencing data)
Intermediate
- Bulk RNA-seq analysis in R
- Single cell RNA-seq analysis
- Introduction to Linear Modelling with R
- Data manipulation and visualisation using R
- Data Science in Python
- Analysis of publicly available microarray data
- Introduction to High Performance Computing
Advanced
- Creating analysis pipelines with Nextflow
- Introduction to Docker for Bioinformatics
- Writing web-apps for Bioinformatics with Shiny
Summer Schools
From 2015 – 2021 we ran a hugely popular, annual Cancer Research UK Bioinformatics Summer School, offering a week-long residential training course in analysis of genomic sequencing data to CRUK-funded scientists from across the UK. The course materials for these and two Autumn/Winter Schools can be accessed via the links below.
- 2021 (July):Functional Genomics
- 2020 (July):Functional Genomics
- 2019 (July):Functional Genomics
- 2018 (July):Functional Genomics
- 2017 (September):Functional Genomics
- 2017 (July):Analysis of Cancer Genomes
- 2016 (December):Essential Data Analysis Skills for Biologists
- 2016 (July):Analysis of Cancer Genomes
- 2015 (July):Best Practices in the analysis of RNA-seq and ChIP-seq data