-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 42
UCSC Xena Mentorship for Underrepresented Students
Similar to other software programming-based fields, there is a severe lack of diversity among biomedical data scientists and tool contributors. In particular, the field of precision medicine is facing enormous challenges and needs diverse perspectives to advance the field and ensure that precision medicine benefits everyone, no matter their background. The future of precision medicine will depend on who we foster as the next generation of genomic data scientists and tool contributors.
Our mentored internship program is for underrepresented UCSC students to apprentice with UCSC Xena. Participating in the Xena project will enable students to gain experience in open source development with an emphasis on genomic and biomedical applications. Students will learn essential skills, including manipulating and analyzing ‘big data’ genomics datasets, using cloud-computing resources, developing automated tests, code documentation, and bioinformatics knowledge. Students will also learn how to participate in open source software development through participation in a real-world genomics project, as well as receive exposure to the many genomics projects based at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute.
UCSC Xena helps biologists, both with and without computation skills, to visualize and analyze cancer genomics datasets. Our web-based data browser enables cancer researchers around the world to discover trends and test their hypotheses. Unique in the medical genomics research field, we allow users to easily view both large public resources generated by consortium around the world AND their own data or data from a publication. We accomplish this using a decoupled server-client architecture, where data is distributed across both public and private servers while being securely combined and visualized in one web-based browser.
We are a team of 3 people:
- Jing Zhu - Principle Investigator, software programmer, data wrangler
- Mary Goldman - UX design, outreach, writing
- Brian Craft - lead software architect
- Interns must commit to 10-12 hours per week, schedule to be determined in consultation with the Xena mentor team.
- We will provide a laptop for working on the project, as well as any cloud compute credits needed.
- We will provide quarterly scholarship for participating student.
- Winter 2022 will be completely virtual with no in-person meetings, except for picking up the laptop. Future quarters will be evaluated on a per-quarter basis.
- Jing Zhu will be the lead mentor, with co-mentors Mary Goldman and Zia Isola, Director of the UCSC Genomics Institute Office of Diversity Programs.
- Students are expected to meet weekly with the Xena Team and Jing Zhu.
- Students are expected to attend 3 RMI events a quarter.
- Quarterly evaluation is required for both student and mentor.
Each student enter the mentorship initially for one academic quarter. If the first quarter works out for both the student and mentor, student will be offered to continue to stay on, with a strong possibility to last till graduation. Continuation is conditioned upon mutually satisfactory quarterly evaluation.