Human Microbiome Data Discovery: A short course on unveiling microbial insights to human health through Common Fund Data

Project Summary The overarching objective of this R25 program is to develop the curricular materials for teaching essential data science skills to early career scientists interested in microbiome research to enable them to access and use data available in the Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE). Although there is an enormous potential for the large datasets available through the CDFE to advance biomedical research, our broad needs assessment has identified that a wide range of researchers lack fundamental skills necessary to use these types of data. Gaps we have identified include identifying the appropriate data sets to answer hypotheses, managing, wrangling, and harmonizing data in preparation for analysis, in addition to performing the analyses. We propose to close this gap and accomplish our objects by: 1) Performing a needs assessment of potential Common Fund Data users, targeting early career clinically oriented faculty developing research related to the human microbiome. 2) Developing curricular materials for knowledge and skills in data science using three datasets developed by NIH Common Fund projects related to the human microbiome, microbial products, and clinical associations. 3) Delivering a two-week in-person short course on data science to a diverse set of early career learners to educate and provide skills necessary for accessing data in the Common Fund Data Ecosystem and incorporating these data sources into research. And 4) Providing extended support beyond the short-course through informatics mentorship to support common fund data use in participant’s area of research. The program will be led by experts in Biomedical Informatics Education and Microbiome Bioinformatics and be supported by several faculty with expertise and extensive educational experience in data science, clinical informatics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, data visualization, and data management. The short course will focus on applications of CFDE to address research questions related to the human microbiome in human health and disease, with a specific focus on diabetes. We anticipate the impact of this program to be substantial in enabling researchers to improve their use of existing CFDE projects into their own research more rapidly and accurately. We will disseminate this work broadly through online resources so that others may train their own teams.