Introduction to Peak Analysis workshop

Note: Some HBC workshops are taught in person and others are online via Zoom. Please take note for scheduling purposes!

ONLINE Workshop dates and times:

Tuesday June 17, 2025: 9:30 AM - 12 PM

Friday June 20, 2025: 9:30 AM - 12 PM

Tuesday June 24, 2025: 9:30 AM - 12 PM

NOTE: Workshop dates are subject to change. Instruction will be mostly learner-centric, requiring a time commitment between the workshop sessions!

Description:

This multi-day hands-on workshop will provide students with a suite of tools and a basic workflow of how to handle data generated from peak calling algorithms. Specifically, the workshop will focus on taking BED file formats (i.e. narrowPeak) and identifying what these regions represent. This workshop will introduce participants to:

Approaches to check peak quality and reproducibility across replicates
Peak annotation methods and tools for visualization
Differential peak enrichment analysis and functional analysis

Prerequisites:

This is one of our advanced workshops, and requires registrants to have attended the following Basic workshop offered by our training team in the last 6-8 months:

Introduction to R

There is an expectation of participants to have some/all of the following programming knowledge:

Solid understanding of data structures and fluent implementation of basic syntax in R.
Ability to use functions regularly and can modify arguments when necessary.
Comfortable installing packages and troubleshooting issues.
Data wrangling expertise (subsetting vectors and data frames) using base R or tidyverse
Familiarity with ggplot2 for data visualization.

I am fluent in R but have not attended the HBC prerequisite workshop, can I still register?

Yes, please register and provide your R/programming exerience on the form, and we’ll get back to you.

Who should attend?

Eligible* Harvard researchers who want to learn:

How to check their peak data for quality
How to annotate peaks with genomic features of interest
How to visualize peaks and their relationships to genomic features
How to perform differential peak enrichment analysis
How to perform functional analysis (such as over-representation analysis)

Cost:

There is a non-refundable and non-transferable $65 registration fee for this advanced workshop.

We will be accepting 25 participants on a first-come, first-served basis:

If you are one of the first 25 eligible* registrants, you will receive an email within 1 week with a link to pay the (non-refundable & non-transferable) $65 registration fee.
If you are not among the first 25 eligible* registrants, you will be added to the waitlist and notified when we open registration for the next iteration of this workshop.

NOTE: You will not have a reserved seat for this workshop until you pay the registration fee. Please make sure you pay within the time stated in that email, else you will lose your spot to someone on the waitlist.

*NOTE: HMS Graduate Students may receive waivers on registration fees. Please register and we’ll followup with you.

Registration:

Please make sure you take the following into account when signing up for the workshop:

Mandatory attendance for all three classes.
2-3 hours of reading and exercises from selected lessons before each workshop sessions.
Active participation during discussion sessions.

(Registration opens 2 - 3 weeks before the start of advanced workshops.)

Eligibility requirements:

^*To be eligible to attend this workshop you should fulfill at least one of the following criteria:

Harvard Medical School researcher in a lab on the Quad, with grants administered by HMS Gordon Hall
Harvard School of Dental Medicine researcher, with grants administered by HMS Gordon Hall
Graduate student at the Harvard Medical School
Researcher affiliated with the Dana-Farber / Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC).
Researcher at a Harvard-affiliated institution participating in HIV related research (CFAR).

If you are unsure of your eligibility, please register anyway and we will get back to you.

NOTE: We do not record our training sessions.

Questions?

Please email us at hbctraining@hsph.harvard.edu with any questions.