One on one research support is available to researchers of any career stage at UW-Madison! Please scroll down for eligibility criteria & our cancellation and reschedule policy.
Click here to book an appointment
- Direct link: https://calendly.com/patriciatran
You will see two booking options depending of your user type, and two options for meeting modalities (Virtually on Zoom or in-person in my office in the Microbial Sciences Building). Note that keycard access is required to access the office floors of the Microbial Sciences Building. If you don’t have access, put a note in your meeting description and I will meet you at the elevators in the lobby. Appointments can be made up to 60 days in advance, and up to 12 hours ahead of time.
For those in the Department of Bacteriology
- Link for those in Bacteriology: https://calendly.com/patriciatran/1hr
Because we are based in the Department of Bacteriology, our services are free and on a first-come first-serve basis for researchers in the Department of Bacteriology, with unlimited appointments per week. Thank you for your understanding!
For those outside of the Department of Bacteriology
- Link for those outside of Bacteriology: https://calendly.com/patriciatran/1hr-outside-bact
We dedicate up to 4hrs per week to help anyone on campus! People from any department can receive one-on-one bioinformatics support at no cost during those allocated times. For extensive research collaborations, set up a meeting with us to discuss potential possibilities. Note: Our booking system automatically determines how many appointments are available based on the 4x/week limit across all users outside of Bacteriology. If there is no spot a given week, please choose another week.
We have also listed a few options under Computing Resources in different departments, some of which have dedicated staff to help their members as well.
Email support is also available during weekdays:
Cancellation and Reschedule Policy:
If you need to cancel or reschedule, please do so with at least a 24-hr notice, so the slot can be freed up, and to help me plan my workday. After frequent cancellations or reschedules (3), we reserve the right to decide on case by case basis. Thank you for your understanding!
Research support over the whole project life cycle
We specialize in supporting researchers at various stages of their projects, from project planning to data analysis to post-publication data sharing. As active scientists ourselves, we can work with you to plan projects and work with your team members for project implementation.
For example, we can help you with:
Project Life Cycle
- Reviewing and providing feedback on proposals and grants that have a bioinformatics and/or computational component.
- Writing letters of support regarding bioinformatics and computational infrastructure for faculty grants or graduate student fellowships
- Developing a methodology plan to answer your research question.
- Identifying the type of omics data to answer your question.
- Identifying ways genomics data types can strengthen your area of expertise.
- Submitting data to public repository to fulfill open science mandates.
- and more!
Learning & Analyzing
Either develop competency in applying these techniques in your work, or if you would like me to perform an analysis for your lab
- Microbiome
- Genome assembly
- Mixed communities or isolates
- Genome Annotation
- Metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs)
- Omics (ChipSeq, Tn-Seq, RNAseq, etc.)
- Phylogenetics
- Functional Genomics
- and much more!
Computational Skills & Pipelines
- Making the most of computing resources at UW-Madison
- Scaling up computational analyses using high-throughput computing
- Data visualization of complex data
- Reproducible documentation and code version control
- Custom code writing for analyses
- Learning how to use containers and package managers
- Creating pipelines for custom applications
- and more!
Examples of research support scenarios:
- Advice on an analysis: You want to perform an analysis, or have an idea, but are not sure where to start and how feasible it is. We will work with you to discuss your whole scientific research question, in order to truly understand what you’re trying to do. We can suggest techniques, methods, softwares, and scientific papers that are relevant, and follow up with you to work on a grant, proposal, fellowship, or future analysis.
- Solving bugs and developing technical skills: For example, you are already well-versed in coding, and are running into a problem that requires debugging (ex. reading and fixing error messages, installation, dependencies, etc.). We will focus on understanding your problem and troubleshoot with you so that you can gain troubleshooting skills.
- Analysis-specific help: For example, if you have an analysis that you’d like to complete to complement a project, and you already have a foundation in coding and bioinformatics, but need further assistance on best methodologies, best practices in the field, how to implement and interpret certain things.
- Software or tool learning: For example, you are seeking to learn coding skills like the command-line, R, Python, how to use cyberinfrastructure (e.g. Research Drive, Globus, Center for High-Throughput Computing), etc. in the hopes of becoming independent in implementing these skills in your own research.
- Scientific collaboration: You are looking for a scientific collaborator with subject-matter expertise in both microbiology and bioinformatics. This is most similar to a typical scientific collaboration, where different members of a team are responsible for different aspects of a larger project. For example, we would perform analyses that would become part of your lab’s research program, manuscripts, grants, etc.
- Campus computing resources: Box, Google Drive, Cloud, CHTC, ResearchDrive, VPN…. There are lots of computing and data resources available, but it can be challenging to make sense of them all. Come talk to us about how these campus resources are connected and relevant to your research workflows.