Designed by Mayo Clinic and Illinois Alliance steering committee member Dr. Saurabh Sinha, the 2014 Computational Genomics Course was an intense week of exploring the latest methodologies and technologies of computational genomics for clinical
application.

For the second year, the course was held at the Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) on the University of Illinois’ Urbana campus. Building on a successful 2013 course, the number of participants doubled to more than 50 attendees. Illinois faculty, postdocs and students filled all available seats at the IGB , and Mayo Clinic allied health staff and fellows participated in the course remotely from Rochester.

Illinois teaching assistant Casey Hanson traveled to Rochester to provide support as a teaching assistant for remote participants.

From Monday to Saturday, a lecture from Illinois faculty was followed by a lab session where participants were given exercises and had hands-on experience performing high-level data analyses.

“Basically, what happened was everyone received a set of instructions on how to solve these exercises that they all had to follow. They were all doing the exercise at the same time in the lab. If someone got stuck, the whole classes couldn’t move ahead until that person had done the step,” explained Sinha. “Each and every person made mistakes and got to learn. No one was left behind. I think it was very much appreciated,” he said.