ABSTRACT PROGRAMMING FOR BIOLOGY 2020 – 2024 The goal of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Course in Programming for Biology is to provide biologists with the advanced knowledge and programming tools they need to deal with the genomic information explosion. Complementary to training in web tools such as BLAST, this course teaches researchers how to manage, analyze and display large data sets by creating dedicated programs that combine existing and custom tools and platforms. This 16 day course begins with an intensive training in Python programming, including object-oriented programming and the BioPython library. The second week introduces essential bioinformatics analysis tools and methods, each accompanied by appropriate programming exercises. We emphasize the design and implementation of complex analysis pipelines that directly address a biologist's research questions using practical software engineering and scientific computing methods. The course combines formal lectures with extensive hands-on laboratories in which students solve a series of computational problem sets drawn from common scenarios in biology research and data management. In a three-day final project that solidifies the course's teachings, students pose real-life problems using their own data and work in groups with faculty to solve them.

NARRATIVE The Programming for Biology Course is an intensive course designed to give biologists the bioinformatics skills necessary to contribute to biological research via the use of computer programming for data organization and mining, and experimental design and analysis. The course combines formal lectures with extensive hands-on laboratories in which students solve a series of computational problem sets drawn from common scenarios in biology research and data management.