The Turing Way: Collaboratively Learning and Sharing Data Science and Research Skills

About the event: The East African Network for Bioinformatics training (EANBiT), seeks to upskill students in Bioinformatics using the model: coursework, 5-week residential training and finally research project placement at partner institutions. EANBiT works with universities in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, to offer MSc in Bioinformatics. It supports curriculum development, offers MSc fellowships to students, and support placement for research. The residential training (gone online this year), has four tracks: technical, Soft skills, Seminars, and Mini projects. The seminars involve talks from leaders in various areas of genomics, including open science.

For open science, in collaboration with H3ABioNet, we seek to expose the students to:

• Open Science principles, and how they apply to our fellows’ research, now and in the future
• Practicing and promoting reproducible and collaborative research - The Turing Way
• Data and Education in Low-income settings: David Selassie
• Leveraging and building a community in science and research - Open Life Science mentoring program
• How to get involved in local communities - Galaxy Africa

About this talk: As one of the panelists, Malvika Sharan introduced The Turing Way  to the students, and discussed the following aspects of Open Science with the help of this project:

1. Collaborative and reproducible research
2. Why the community-building inclusive project is essential
3. How African researchers can get involved in this project
4. How we can openly learn and share research skills to advance science in our communities