Short Courses in Biotechnology
The Biotechnology Program has historically offered one-week, immersive short courses on emerging and platform technologies, such as Bioinformatics, Flow Cytometry, Multivariate Data Analysis, Proteomics, and most recently, Cultivated Meat. Courses take place on the UC Davis campus or via Zoom and are led by experts in specific life science and engineering technologies. Participants include students, faculty and researchers from both academia and industry. Industry partners often played a key role in sponsoring summer course components, including guest lectures and leading laboratory sessions. In addition to serving the research community, we periodically offer "train-the-trainer" courses in genomics and bioinformatics for high school instructors and community college faculty.
Spring 2024
Data Science Focused R Programming - Beginner Short Course
**Register Here**
Course instructor, Dr. Dmitry Grapov, will hold a virtual two-day course focused on hands-on R programming for reproducible data analysis on May 20-21, 2024. The course will help participants:
- Get up and running with R using the Rstudio
- Understand R data types and functions
- Use data frame manipulation to wrangle data
- Visualize and plot with ggplot2 and plotly
- Put it all together by creating a reproducible data analysis report
The registration fee for this course is $300 for University of California students, postdocs, staff and faculty, $400 for other academics, and $500 for industry/other participants.
Past Short Courses
See below for courses that were recently offered and may be offered again in the future.
Cultivated Meat Short Course (Sept 12 - 15, 2023)
This virtual introductory course provided technical information and was suitable for new researchers and professional practitioners in the field of cultivated meat and alt proteins. The short course touched on a range of topics related to the development of cultivated meat, including:
- Cultivated Meat Research Challenges
- Structure and Physiology of Meat
- Cell Lines and Media Development
- Product Development and Regulatory Considerations
- Nutrition, Quality and Consumer Preferences
- Technoeconomic Analyses
Instructors: The course featured faculty researchers participating in the UC Davis Cultivated Meat Consortium. Discussed research was supported in part by NSF Growing Convergence Research Award #2021132.
Format: This course was offered live via remote instruction using the Zoom platform. Log-in instructions to access the course were included on the enrollment confirmation which was emailed to participants after registration. A recording of this course was available for a limited time for those unable to attend the live session. By enrolling in the course, participants agreed to being recorded for the purposes of instruction.
Course Schedule: The lectures for this course was held on Zoom on September 12-15, from 9am-12:30pm (PDT). The final course schedule was shared with participants prior to the start of the course.
Data Science Focused R Programming - Beginner Short Course
Course instructor, Dr. Dmitry Grapov, held a virtual two-day course focused on hands-on R programming for reproducible data analysis on May 1-2, 2023. The course included instruction on:
- Get up and running with R using the RStudio
- Understand R data types and functions
- Use data frame manipulation to wrangle data
- Visualize and plot with ggplot2 and plotly
- Put it all together by creating a reproducible data analysis report
The registration fee for this course was $300 for University of California students, postdocs, staff and faculty, $400 for other academics and $500 for industry/other participants.
Network Mapping 101
This intensive Zoom course was taught by Dr. Dmitry Grapov (Creative Data Solutions) on October 24-25, 2022. The course included instruction on:
- Multivariate exploratory analysis and visualization - identifying and/or reviewing data analysis plans
- Creation, validation and visualization of classification and regression machine learning predictive models
- Calculation of biochemical, structural similarity and/or empirical networks
- Use of network mapping to integrate data analysis results and create publication-quality network visualizations
This course targeted beginner and intermediate practitioners of applied data analysis. A combination of lectures and demonstrations were used to prepare students for hands-on labs allowing self-guided exploration of covered topics. Hands-on labs used user interface, API and code-based tools.
Cultivated Meat 101
Building on the research that occurred since the inaugural offering in fall 2021, this course was taught via Zoom from Sept 13 - 16, 2022 (9:00am - 12:15pm PST), in conjunction with the UC Davis Cultivated Meat Consortium. The 4-day virtual course included:
- Cultivated Meat Research Challenges
- Structure and Physiology of Meat
- Cell Lines and Media Development
- Product Development and Regulatory Considerations
- Nutrition, Quality and Consumer Preferences
- Technoeconomic Analyses
Participants were invited to join the UC Davis Cultivated Meat and Alternative Proteins Summit on Sept 12th (virtual and in-person participation was available) and the in-person networking mixer on the evening of Wednesday, September 14th (registration information was shared with course participants).
Short Course Development and Administration
If interested in any of the above course registration processes or logistics, please contact program manager, Jacki Balderama (jbalderama@ucdavis.edu). If interested in collaborating on the development of a new summer course, please contact the program director, Dr. Denneal Jamison-McClung (dsjamison@ucdavis.edu).
