The second iteration of the Data-driven approaches to understanding dementia course is taking place next year; 13 – 17 April 2026 at EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Hinxton, UK.
To support the UK DRI researchers wishing to attend the training, the Research Operations will sponsor a limited number of spots on the course.
The course programme is arranged by UK DRI and EMBL-EBI. The course is aimed at individuals working in the dementia research space who have minimal experience in bioinformatics. Applicants are expected to be at an early stage of using bioinformatics in their research with the need to develop their skills and knowledge further. Participants will need a basic knowledge of the Unix command line, and the R statistical package.
We recommend these free tutorials:
- Introduction to the Unix environment – https://swcarpentry.github.io/shell-novice/index.html
- Introduction to R – https://swcarpentry.github.io/r-novice-inflammation/
- Introduction to Python – http://swcarpentry.github.io/python-novice-gapminder/
What will I learn?
Learning outcomes
After this course you should be able to:
- Explore publicly available data of interest, including dementia specific resources
- Use software and tools to manipulate and analyse data
- Apply appropriate bioinformatics methodologies to dementia research projects
- Combine different types of data to gain further insights
- Identify EMBL-EBI data resources to access and analyse relevant data
Course content
During this course, you will learn about:
- Single-cell analysis in dementia research
- Databases for regulatory information
- Biomarkers and polygenic risk score
- Tools for uncovering mechanisms of dementia from omics datasets
- BioImaging in dementia
- Machine learning approaches in dementia
- Dementia data resources: DataMap and DPUK
- EMBL-EBI data resources: ChEMBL, Gene Expression Atlas, Open Targets, PGS Catalog, and PRIDE