Past Tutorials
Demystifying the tenure-track faculty search process
September 25, 2020. Come join Brian Aguado, current Chemical and Biological Engineering postdoctoral fellow and future Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at UC San Diego for a discussion about the tenure-track faculty position search process. Please come with your questions about application materials, interviews, seminars, chalk talks, managing offers, suggestions for handling COVID-19, etc.
Habits, Happiness, and Productivity
For this month's free workshop the Postdoctoral Association of Colorado Boulder partnered up with the Graduate School for an amazing session given by Leslie Blood, the director of the Graduate Community and Professional Development.
Come join us for a workshop on habits, happiness and productivity! This is a challenging time for all of us, but with a little planning and determination, we can still increase our work output while decreasing our stress. From accountability to timing work blocks this workshop covers it all.
For this and more, follow us on our Facebook and Twitter pages!
Resilience
For this month's free workshop the Postdoctoral Association of Colorado Boulder partnered up with the Faculty & Staff Assistance Program (FSAP) for an amazing session given by Stanley Ly, an FSAP Staff Counselor, specialized in counseling and psychological support for individuals experiencing crises.
The significance of developing emotional and mental resilience has always been important for our overall wellness and balance when we’re encountered with challenges or distress. Perhaps now more than ever, how we stay emotionally resolute, motivated, and adaptable to changing and often uncomfortable circumstances bears tremendous importance. Join us for this engaging conversation on what is emotional resilience, what does neuroscience tell us about how the resilient brain functions, the challenges to resilience, and practical and applicable research-backed skills that build resilience. This 60-minute discussion includes small group breakouts.
Learning Objectives:
- Be able to define resiliency and how it affects our recovery from distress
- Learn about common obstacles to emotional and mental resilience
- Personally identify 1-3 practical and immediately implementable ways to build emotional and mental resilience
- Connect and engage with peers and colleagues across the university on this important and relevant matter
Facilitator: Stanley Ly, MA, LPC
Stanley Ly, MA, LPC is a Licensed Professional Counselor in the Faulty and Staff Assistance Program. In 2014, he provided psychological first aid to individuals affected by the floods in Boulder County in 2013. Since 2007, he has worked with sexual assault crisis hotlines, hospitals, and jails providing counseling and psychological support for individuals experiencing psychiatric crises.
Data Science
- Want to understand trends or patterns?
- Want to pick-up some Machine Learning?
- Want to better interpret your data?
The Postdoctoral Association of Colorado, Boulder has organized this series of monthly tutorials/workshops on topics that may be useful to postdocs, students, and faculties across different disciplines. This month's tutorial, hosted on Zoom, is going to be on some Data Science techniques. The Zoom meeting was recorded and the video is posted here.
"Data science" is a catch-all term for a wide variety of workflows and analysis techniques, typically with the goal of discovering something about your data that someone can take action on. In this tutorial, we will use a few datasets as case studies to explore different aspects of data science:
- The "iris" dataset - load a "nice" dataset, then apply classification techniques to distinguish different types of flowers;
- A wine quality dataset - apply approaches to handling "high-dimensional" data to pick out which features of wine best distinguish their quality;
- A collection of recent papers from the bioRxiv related to coronaviruses - discover the joy and despair of data cleaning.
This tutorial was done in Python. If you'd like to follow along, you need to have Python set up with the numpy, pandas, matplotlib, and sklearn packages installed, as well as Jupyter notebooks. Links to the datasets and helper scripts are uploaded on this dedicated Github repository in advance for download.
Image Analysis Tutorial
- Do you analyze a lot of images in your work?
- Avoid tedious image analysis by hand
- Learn how the basics of image analysis, including counting and measuring objects
Please join us for a free workshop on Image Analysis in MATLAB, given by Dr. Jian Wei Tay, from the BioFrontiers Institute Advanced Light Microscopy Core at CU Boulder.
Image analysis is the process of extracting meaningful information from images, with wide-ranging applications such as counting items on a factory conveyor belt, monitoring cells on a microscope, and self-driving cars. In this tutorial, we introduce the basics of image analysis in MATLAB. We discuss a typical image analysis pipeline to identify, count, and measure the length of cells in a fluorescence microscope image. We also discuss imaging concepts, such as how raw image data is displayed, image types, and contrast ratios that might impact the accuracy of the analysis. While microscope images are used as examples, the MATLAB functions and concepts introduced are common to analyzing any digital image.
It is important that you have MATLAB installed on your machine and bring your laptop to the workshop. If you do not have a current MATLAB installation, please use the Software Downloads and Licensing website of the University so that you can download it and activate it with your free licence associated to the University.
Reckoning with Spongebob and 'Uncle Spam': US militarization and indigenous poetic protest in the Pacific
Speaker: Dr. Bonnie Etherington, Environmental Futures
Date and time: Wednesday, December 2 at 1:30 pm
Abstract:
The ways that colonial powers map and describe Pacific island locations have enormous environmental, social, and political effects on Oceania’s populations and communities, including non-human ones. Representations of islands as small, empty, and isolated and as places to be explored or used as research sites are directly linked to the ways they have been exploited by colonialism and militarism, exacerbating the destruction of their lands and contamination of their waters, and contributing to how world governments ignore Indigenous peoples and their calls for political recognition, demilitarization, and urgent climate action. In this seminar, I will show how contemporary Indigenous authors use poems in particular to tell their own stories in different protest contexts that challenge colonial stories about the ocean, specifically those that circulate through and reinforce US militarism.
GIT
- Have you ever lost your work on your computer?
- Do you have multiple copies of the same file?
- Do you work on a collaborative project and want to keep track of authorship changes?
Learn how to do all that and more on our GIT Tutorial, given by Dr. Jed Brown, Assistant Professor in Computer Science, CU Boulder.
In this tutorial we show the basics of Git version control, a system that records changes to a file or set of files over time so that you can recall specific versions later. Git is a powerful system for managing individual and group projects, including source code and papers. We introduce everyday Git functionality as well as common workflows for individual, small-group, and community projects. In addition to contributor roles like preparing and revising pull requests, we will also explore integrator roles such as reviewing, merging, and release/branch management, as well as related services. Material useful for the Git tutorial is available on this dedicated GitHub repository for attendees to download.
MATLAB
In this tutorial we learn the fundamentals of programming in MATLAB.
It is important that you have MATLAB installed on your machine and bring your laptop to the workshop. If you do not have a current MATLAB installation, please use the Software Downloads and Licensing website of the University so that you can download it and activate it with your free licence associated to the University.
We are going to explore different data types and structures (from the basic types, array and matrices, to the more advanced cells). We are going to learn how to display, print and publish our results in different formats. We are going to learn how to debug our code and how to do some data analysis and visualization. Material useful for the MATLAB tutorial will be further available on this dedicated GitHub repository for attendees to download.
Intermediate Python
For this second tutorial on Python given by Gary Nave, we will move to more advanced topics.
This workshop provides an introduction to using Python for scientific research, including manipulating arrays with NumPy, loading and saving data with SciPy and Pandas, and plotting results with Matplotlib. The workshop is intended for those with some basic familiarity with Python syntax who are interested in learning more and applying it to their research. However, beginners are still welcome! If you have specific questions you'd like to see addressed, send me an email at Gary.Nave@colorado.edu.
LaTeX Documents and Presentations
In this LaTex tutorail we will learn some of the basics of LaTeX: typesetting different documents (such as, technical reports, books, and slide presentations), sectioning, cross-references, tables and different media (figures and videos), automatic generation of bibliographies and indexes, typing mathematical expressions; and, according to people's interest and time resources we can explore some more advanced topics, such as drawing graphic elements with the TikZ package.
Attendees can download ahead a LaTeX compiler on their system (MikTeX for Windows and Linux and MacTeX for Mac) and a LaTeX editor of their choice, or use the free online editor that we are going to use for the demo.
Material useful for the LaTeX tutorial will be further available on this dedicated GitHub Repo for attendees to download.
Advice and insights on the academic job search
Join us to hear from recent CU Postdocs who have successfully landed positions in academia. Building on our last seminar about the faculty job search, panelists will describe their experiences during the process and give practical advice for those currently seeking or interested in research and teaching positions at both public and private universities. Questions are highly encouraged!
Our panelists are:
- Dr. Brian Aguado (UC San Diego, formerly Anseth lab)
- Dr. Esther Braselmann (Georgetown University, formerly Palmer lab)
- Dr. Kristin Moore (CU Boulder, formerly Cameron lab)
Intro to Python
The second workshop in this tutorials series is on Python. Gary Nave from the Computer Science Department will give a brief overview on the basics of using Python, particularly in regards to scientific computing, and will provide hands-on exercises. He will talk about basic syntax, structure, and package management to provide a starting point for anyone hoping to use Python in their research or studies. Feel free to bring your questions or email (Gary.Nave@colorado.edu) about specific questions you have in advance.
Dimensionality Reduction
The first workshop in this tutorials series is on Dimensionality Reduction. Sophie Giffard from the Computer Science Department will give a brief overview on dimensionality reduction techniques that are useful to compress, explain, pre-process and interpret any data. A hands-on exercise with Python and scikit-learn will be the second part of the tutorial. The workshop material can be found at:
https://github.com/sophiegif/Workshop_dimensionality_reduction .
Attendees are encouraged to download or clone the repository before coming, and install python3 with numpy, scikitlearn and pandas libraries on their machine.