Support
The Vermont Biomedical Research Network is a group of core facilities at the University of Vermont Medical School that provide genomic, microscopy, and proteomic support to researchers. I worked as a bioinformatics intern for the genomics component of the lab. While I did spend some time in the lab learning sequencing techniques and protocols, the majority of my responsibilities was data analysis and computation. Much of my time was spent developing code and documentation to allow others to apply our tools. This included things such as a Proteomics R package to extract, modify and analyzes results. The majority of my time was spent building a Nextflow pipeline to use long-read and short-read DNA sequences to assemble a genome. This process is containerized to allow for reproducible results, and has many applications to genomic research allowing comparisons between 'normal' and 'abnormal' (such as adapted, sick, or cancerous) populations.
Through this internship, I experienced varying roles on both Bioinformatics (computational and analysis oriented) and wet-lab (actually in the labs doing experiments) teams and how they work together to achieve usable and meaningful results. In addition, I also had the opportunity to get trained on new sequencing technology (of which 8 currently exist). Outside of the lab, much of my coding was done independently and required me to do much more extensive and in depth research to complete my projects (then would be found in a classroom setting).