Teaching
Summary
This portfolio item demonstrates my ability to communicate through some teaching experience. I've been a lecturer for an R workshop series, and a teaching assistant for a statistics course and a Bioinformatics course.
R workshop lecturer
In an R workshop series hosted by Ecoscope, I was honoured to lecture with consultants from UBC's SCARL (now ASDa, Applied Statistics and Data Science Group). Students paid to attend. We hosted workshops on the following content.
Introduction to R
R Studio and R environment
Data types, importing data
Base graphics*
Data subsetting and indexing
Data manipulation and reshaping
Regular expressions and string manipulation
Individual purchase
ggplot2 X 2
Experimental design
Special topics
Statistical Models in R
Objects: Class and Attributes
Writing Functions in R*
Reproducible research with R
Creating presentations and report writing
Collaborative research with Git
*Lectured by me
Workshops emphasised hands-on learning. Students worked with us on their laptops and solved exercises with our help. I was available to help students with exercises in every workshop, including the ones I lectured.
We often answered students' questions about their research after the workshops. My background as a bioinformatician was often useful at this point, because many research problems' data required bioinformatic processing prior to statistical analysis.
Statistics teaching assistant
I was a teaching assistant for a statistics course on methods for high-dimensional biological data. My responsibilities included marking and teaching a tutorial. In the tutorial, I taught students how to computationally apply their statistical methods. We covered the following topics.
Probability
Exploratory data anaylsis
Analysis of variance
Univariate linear regression
Univariate linear regression, large surveys
RNA-Seq (generalized linear models, large surveys)
Basic clustering and classification
Model selection
Bootstrapping
Bioinformatics teaching assistant
I was a teaching assistant for a bioinformatics course. My responsibilities included marking and teaching a tutorial. In the tutorial, I taught students how to computationally apply their bioinformatics methods. In the tutorial, I covered the following topics.
SSH (server access via the terminal)
Basic unix
Genetic sequencing inspection (FastQC)
Short genetic read alignment (BWA & SAMtools)
Integrative Genomics Viewer (IGV)
Phylogentic tree estimation
Single nucleotide polymorphism detection (read pile-ups, and BCFtools)
Short read assembly (Velvet)
Metagenomic analysis (MEGAN)