Tools for Reproducible Research

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

Online Workshop dates and times:

Friday, November 14, 2025: 9:30 AM - 12 PM

Tuesday, November 18, 2025: 9:30 AM - 12 PM

Friday, November 21, 2025: 9:30 AM - 12 PM

NOTE: Workshop dates are subject to change - please check back!

Instruction will be mostly learner-centric, requiring a time commitment between the workshop sessions!

Description:

Rigorous science requires that the science is reproducible. However, investigations of bioinformatics approaches have found that results are oftentimes difficult to reproduce. Therefore, in this hands-on workshop we will:

Implement git to handle version control
Use GitHub and GitHub Desktop to store and distribute your code
Employ RMarkdown for creating reports

Prerequisites:

This is one of our advanced workshops, and assumes that users have a working knowledge of coding with R or 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?

Harvard-affiliated researchers who want to learn:

How to make more reproducible bioinformatic pipelines
How to implement version control practices with git
How to host their own code on GitHub
How to manage GitHub using GitHub Desktop
How to create HTML reports for your analyses with RMarkdown

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:

Preference is given to Harvard-affiliated researchers:

at the Harvard Medical School in a lab on the Quad, with grants administered by HMS OR
at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, with grants administered by HMS Gordon Hall OR
an HMS graduate student OR
affiliated with Dana-Farber / Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC) OR
an AIDS researcher affiliated with Harvard Center for AIDS 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.