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Advanced Courses on Life Sciences

Live Online Course – 7th Edition

Introduction to R

January 8th-12th, 2024

Live sessions will be recorded

Introduction to R

Course Overview & Programme

The aim of this course is to give an introduction to R addressed to people that have never used R.

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

  • Understand R syntax and navigate RStudio software sufficiently to author (or identify, evaluate, and apply) code specific to their individual research fields
  • Identify and apply code and workflow strategies that promote reproducibility, efficiency, and collaboration
  • Confidently anticipate and troubleshoot common errors and gain help from the R user community

Instruction via lecture and live-coding will be followed by exercises and multichoice questions to practice and evaluate skills.  Students will have the option to perform exercises with class data or their own data.

Orientation to RStudio software and R language

  • Manipulate basic data structures: vectors, matrices, dataframes, lists
  • Install code packages and use functions
  • Manage working directory and environment
  • Establish good coding style practices

Read and inspect data

  • Import tabular, spatial, and other data formats
  • Perform quick data inspection via summary functions
  • Perform quick data inspections via plot functions

Data management

  • Identify and handle missing values
  • Subset data by multiple methods
  • Create new variables
  • Group and summarize data
  • Join two datasets based on common ID value
  • Export data to common formats

Data visualization (ggplot2)

  • Create common graphs (scatterplot, boxplot, bar graph, time series plot)
  • Customize graph text and aesthetics
  • Export graphs to common image formats

Efficiency and reproducibility

  • Identify common strategies to manage projects in R
  • Use R Markdown to interweave code and text
  • Find and evaluate R packages and help resources
  • Write your own functions to perform common tasks

All participants must have a computer (Windows, Macintosh) with current versions of R and R Studio pre-installed. If you have any problem installing them, please contact the course coordinator.

The use of webcam and headphones is strongly recommended, and access to a good internet connection is required.

Instructor

Ashton Drew instructor for Transmitting Science

Dr. Ashton Drew
KDV Decision Analysis LLC
United States of America

Dates & Schedule

January 8th-12th, 2024

14:00-20:00 (Madrid time zone)

Online live sessions from Monday to Friday, following the daily schedule, below (Madrid time zone).

• 13:00-13:50 Open office hours
• 14:00-16:30 Teaching
• 1-hour break
• 17:30-20:00 Teaching
• 20:00-21:00 Open office hours

During open office hours, the instructor will be available on Zoom to answer questions and solve problems with the exercises.

Total course hours: 35

This course is equivalent to 1 ECTS (European Credit Transfer System) at the Life Science Zurich Graduate School. The recognition of ECTS by other institutions depends on each university or school.

Language

English

This course will be delivered live online

This course will be taught using a combination of live (synchronous) sessions on Zoom and tasks to be completed in between live sessions on the Slack platform.

Live sessions will be recorded. Recordings will be made available to participants for a limited period of time. However, attendance to the live sessions is required.

 

Places

Places are limited to 16 participants and will be occupied by strict registration order.

Participants who have completed the course will receive a certificate at the end.

Soledad De Esteban-Trivigno Transmitting Science coordinator

Dr. Soledad De Esteban-Trivigno

Transmitting Science
Spain

Haris Saslis coordinator for Transmitting Science

Dr. Haris-Saslis

Transmitting Science
Greece

Fees & Discounts

  • Course Fee
  • Early bird (until November 30th, 2023):
  • 486 €
    (388.80 € for Ambassador Institutions)
  • Regular (after November 30th, 2023):
  • 560 €
    (448 € for Ambassador Institutions)
  • Prices include VAT.
    After registration you will receive confirmation of your acceptance on the course.
    Payment is not required during registration.

We offer discounts on the Course Fee.

Discounts are not cumulative. Participants receive the highest appropriate discount.

We also offer the possibility of paying in two instalments. Please contact us to request this.

Former participants of Transmitting Science courses receive a 5% discount on the Course Fee.

20% discount on the Course Fee is offered to members of certain organisations (Ambassador Institutions). If you wish to apply for this discount, please indicate it in the Registration form (proof will be asked later). If you would like your institution to become a Transmitting Science Ambassador Institution, please contact us at communication@transmittingscience.com

Unemployed scientists, as well as PhD students without any grant or scholarship to develop their PhD, can benefit from a 40% discount on the Course Fee. This applies only to participants based in Spain. If you wish to ask for this discount, please contact us. The discount may apply for a maximum of 2 places, which will be covered by strict registration order.

Registration

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