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The Bioinformatics Training and Education Program (BTEP)

What is BTEP?

BTEP is an Office of Science and Technology Resources (OSTR) program dedicated to

increasing the awareness and understanding of bioinformatics techniques and processes among CCR scientists, with the goal of empowering CCR scientists to perform a basic, informed set of analyses on their own behalf. --- BTEP

BTEP organizes talks on bioinformatic related topics and hosts trainings on commercial and non-commercial bioinformatics tools. In addition, the BTEP website is an excellent resource for finding NIH wide bioinformatics events (See the NIH Bioinformatics Training Calendar) and learning more regarding bioinformatics software available to NCI researchers (See the BTEP Software pages).

NIH BTEP Calendar

The NIH Bioinformatics Training Calendar contains descriptions and links to bioinformatics training events and talks on related topics from all over the NIH campus, not just BTEP sponsored events.

Announcements

Announcements are in the form of "news", including updated information about online learning resource licenses (Coursera, Dataquest) and available NGS analysis software packages (Partek Flow, Qlucore, Qiagen, etc.), and "bulletins". The bulletins are a monthly resource sent via email to all CCR employees; these include featured events, announcements, and topic spotlights.

Distinguished Speaker Seminar Series

Each year, BTEP hosts a Distinguished Speaker Seminar Series with notable guest speakers from around the world involved in groundbreaking cancer -omics research or research of interest to the CCR community.

  • Speakers for 2024 include Casey Greene (CU Anschutz), Caroline Uhler (MIT), Angela Brooks (UCSC), Rafael Irizarry (Harvard), Olivier Elemento (Weill Cornell Medicine), Elaine Mardis (Nationwide Children's Hospital), Rachel O'Neill (Univ. of Connecticut), Seth Blackshaw (Johns Hopkins), and Carol Bult (The Jackson Lab).

BTEP Coding Club

The BTEP Coding club is an initiative to provide more tailored bioinformatics training to the NCI community. Each month the Coding Club features a 1-hour demo / tutorial of a bioinformatics tool, software, skill, or platform. These tutorials / demos range in experience level from beginner to advanced. We welcome topic suggestions from the NCI community. Email us at ncibtep@nih.gov if there is a specific topic you would like to see featured.

Other Seminar Series

BTEP occasionally hosts other seminar series with more focused topics. Examples from 2024 include AI in Biomedical Research @ NIH and Getting Started with scRNA-Seq.

FAQ Forums

BTEP maintains several Question and Answer Forums of interest to the NCI/CCR community, where researchers can ask questions on specific bioinformatic topics. There are currently FAQ forums for the following topics:

Upcoming Classes

BTEP offers trainings on diverse topics such as cancer biology resources, machine learning / AI, NIH computational resources, OSTR licensed software, Programming (Unix command line, R, and Python), and next-generation sequencing analysis methods (RNA-Seq, ATAC-Seq, Variant Calling, microbiome, etc.). Upcoming classes hosted by BTEP can be found at https://bioinformatics.ccr.cancer.gov/btep/classes/#BTEP.

Most BTEP events are recorded and recordings are available in the BTEP Video Archive 24-48 hours following an event. Many BTEP training events are also associated with additional documentation including the code, data, and other information pertaining to a given topic.