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Assisting Bioinformatics Programs at Minority Institutions: Needs Assessment, and Lessons Learned -- A Look at an Internship Program

Over the last two decades, there has been a general acknowledgement within the scientific community that modern biology is becoming increasingly computational and to be prepared biologists need to build computational skills. We present work in assisting Bioinformatics efforts at minority institutions in the USA funded through a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant over the last 15 years. The primary aim was to create a program for assisting minority institutions in building multidisciplinary bioinformatics training programs. The program involves four components for immediate and long-term increases in research opportunities at minority institutions. Specifically, we describe the results of a two month internship program. Through pre and post surveys reported by the participants, we have measured the skills levels of the internship participants prior to the training beginning and at the end of the training. The interns in the program have a stated interest in bioinformatics and are drawn exclusively from multiple minority serving institutions (MSIs) across the United States. The results of the incoming surveys indicate that the participants have acquired basic bioinformatics knowledge, but have not acquired general computational science skills needed to be successful practitioners within the field. This program has been a highly successful outreach effort and a very sound and cost-effective use of the Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) funding program from NIH. Important lessons have been learned about bioinformatics education that should be implemented at the policy level in order to ensure that educators, students and researchers at minority serving institutions can address science problems using state-of-the-art computational methods, computational genomics and Big Data. We offer suggestions based on our experience in working with MSIs and with High Performance Computing (HPC) to help improve the preparation of students for careers as bioinformatics scientists.