This week’s seminar is divided into two parts:
The first half will introduce how the rest of the seminars will look. In particular, we will look together at the question sheet that we will use every week, and learn where to find answers to these questions in a typical research article (we will use this paper to introduce this topic). Indeed, the aim of these seminars is to teach you how to read a scientific article about a data-driven life science topic and learning to find answers to these questions will teach you how to do this systematically. Each week, you will all be assigned a paper to read, and you should be ready to discuss the answers to all of these questions during the seminar. Everyone will be selected at random to answer one or more questions from the question sheet, and/or describe selected figures. The quality of your answers and of your general participation will determine your grade for each seminar.
The second assignment this week is for individuals to map out data-driven life science research. The idea is that each person gives a very short presentation of a peer-reviewed paper that fall under the umbrella of data-driven life sciences, along with a database that openly shares data for future research. The hope is that we get a good overview of research topics and start understanding the policies that researchers take around data-driven life sciences. This will also give us an opportunity to discuss the pros and cons, as well as the ethical aspects of data sharing. Each presentation should not exceed 4 minutes.
Note that this week’s seminar will also serve as foundation for your projects! Indeed, a large part of the project is to choose a paper of interest, read and dissect it. The rest of the project consists in reanalyzing the data in a different manner, for which this week’s lab is probably very important.