Enthusiastic Response to the First ELIXIR-NL Galaxy Training Course in the Netherlands

An ELIXIR-NL training course entitled Bioinformatics for Translational Medicine using Galaxy: see it, do it, teach it! was held on October 17 - 19, 2018 in Amsterdam. Participants were enthusiastic about the course contents, and particularly interested in the link of using Galaxy workflows for training and teaching. For this workshop we used the European Galaxy server via their wonderful Training Infrastructure as a Service (TIaaS) setup.

The workshop consisted of two parts, which were separately targeting two groups of people: 1) Biomedical & translational medicine researchers/students who are keen on bioinformatics and 2) educators in the “bio” domain who would like to start using Galaxy in their courses as an introduction to Bioinformatics.

In this workshop, a series of bioinformatics topics were taught in the Galaxy environment and the application of Galaxy into teaching has triggered interest and good response from the attendees. The follow-up feedback from the attendees is very positive.

The full list of topics covered in this training course can be found at the course webpage and all the training materials are available on the Galaxy training materials website (also suitable for self-study!)

The course was organized by members of the DTL Galaxy Interest Group, more specifically by Chao (Cico) Zhang (VU), Sanne Abeln (VU), Anton Feenstra (VU), Saskia Hiltemann (ErasmusMC), Mateusz Kuzak (DTL) and Celia van Gelder (DTL).

A big thank you! to the GalaxyEU team for providing the TIaaS service; it saved us a lot of time in preparation, and everything ran very smoothly on the day, and the team were on standby throughout the workshop to help in case we encountered any issues, it was a big factor in the success of the workshop, thanks a lot!