The Practical Genomics workshop launched in 2011 at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine under the leadership of Drs. Sarah Wheelan, Luigi Marchionni, and Jonathan Pevsner.  Drs. Elana Fertig and John McGready provided invaluable support teaching statistical concepts. The first iterations of the workshop taught participants Unix, R, Python, Galaxy, basic statistics, ChIP-seq, RNA-seq, and metagenomic analysis with the goal of teaching biologists how to keep their research relevant during a time of exponential growth in access and affordability to genomics datasets. 

In recent years, the workshop has evolved into a hybrid event that is held at multiple institutions. The workshop is currently focused on single cell analysis and is designed to be an accessible learning environment with opportunities for participants to interact and ask questions to instructors and teaching assistants available to help participants throughout the workshop.

Next Generation Sequencing technology ushered in a new era of genomics research. Biologists suddenly had quick and affordable access to unprecedented amounts of valuable biological data. The problem was they did not know how to harness its value and parse out the information given to them through this technology. Dr. Wheelan identified the need for hybrid training in order to teach biologists how to interact with these new data and understand the information analysis programs were telling them. The Practical Genomics workshop was the first time many participants were ever given the opportunity to learn hands-on programming and gain real-life experience analyzing and interpreting data. This hands-on learning environment was found to be most valuable to our course participants, who were able to learn basic concepts of analysis and have practice writing scripts while also receiving hands-on support from instructors and TAs. 

Over the years, the workshop has evolved from teaching ChIP-seq and RNA-seq analysis to single cell analysis, from 4-day in-person events to virtual, and now hybrid. Rather than just teaching the concepts of analysis, participants were taught exactly how to do the analysis themselves using a common dataset.  This program shift increased the program’s value  for primary investigators looking to train graduate students and postdocs in this type of research. 

As founding faculty have moved on to new endeavors, the workshop has also grown. Dr. Luigi Marchionni has expanded the workshop to be held jointly with researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and Dr. Frederick Tan leads the workshop for participants in Baltimore, MD.

The program was originally sponsored and funded by a NIH R25 grant and has now evolved to be a self-sustaining program through institutional support and registration fees.