Who we are
Lifescitrainers.org is a way to connect anyone and everyone who does short-format training (workshops, boot camps, short-courses, etc.) in the life sciences. This site is a place to share resources, advice, and conversation – all in the service of improving our teaching and our careers.
Why short-format training?
In many areas of the life sciences new technologies and approaches (especially, but not only computational ones) are changing rapidly. It’s not possible for formal training (undergraduate/graduate) to keep pace, but short-format training can fill these gaps. Short-format training comes with its own set of challenges, and this community works together to address them.
How to join
Membership is open to all trainers who serve researchers and educators in the life sciences
Most of the community is active on Slack (online chat forum).
This site is new, but as we grow we will host member posts on training content and videos of online meetups and presentations. You can also join the trainer’s registry and/or post a biography.
- Join the Slack


How I Teach Life Scientists…to Build Reproducible, Scalable Workflows with Nextflow
The term “reproducible research” has been used to describe the idea that a scientific publication should be distributed along with all the raw data and metadata used in the study, all the code and/or computational notebooks needed to produce results…

March 2022: Community Discussion – The Return to In-Person Training
Many instructors have or shortly will be running their first in-person events since the pandemic, what will change?

February 2022: How I teach Life Scientists… to Build Inclusive Communities
Ladies, LatinR, ArabR, AfricaR, miR, and useR! are inspiring. In this talk, I will reflect on my experiences playing a role in building such communities.

January 2022: How I teach life scientists… Not to be scared of image analysis
As a molecular-biologist-turned-computational-biologist, I remember how difficult it was to start creating my own image analysis workflows.

December 2021 How I teach life scientists… Gaps, Missteps, and Errors in Data Analysis
As many parts of biological and biomedical research are becoming data-intensive, the typical graduate training in this area involves courses in coding and statistics.

November 2021 How I teach life scientists… R
How I Teach Life Scientists to Code in R; How I Teach Life Scientists About Reproducibility and Data Analysis Using R