On the Scene with the Associate Dean: BIOTRAIN 730

All scientists need to communicate ideas, experimental approaches, and results. But how do you gain these skills and what tools are available to assist you?

BIOTRAIN 730 is for YR2+ PhD students who want to learn to present scientific results with maximum clarity, impact, and integrity. No artistic aptitude or programming experience is required!

The course will be taught by Dr. Greg Wray (Professor of Biology) and Hannah Devens (CMB/Biology PhD student). You may have heard of a similar course and are confused: BIOTRAIN 730 is an expansion and replacement for "Graphic Design for Biologists" (BIO 790), previously offered every other year.

Dr. Wray approached me a few months ago and offered to expand the course for all interested SoM biomedical students. He explained his motivation: “I firmly believe that students need to learn to communicate their results effectively and ethically and that these practical skills are an important component of professional development for all scientists. My experience teaching this class and the feedback (up to years later!) is that the students find these to be among the most important ‘soft skills’ that they learn while in grad school.” OBGE and I agreed with the importance of teaching these skills and were thrilled to facilitate the creation of the course under the BIOTRAIN code.

Hannah Devens, the incoming OBGE Administrative Fellow is co-developer and co-instructor of record for BIOTRAIN 730. She looks forward to sharing her expertise in data visualization: “I’m very excited to have the opportunity to be an instructor of record on this course. Curriculum design is an important skill for future educators that isn’t usually available in traditional teaching assistant position. It’s often said that you don’t truly master something until you are able to teach it, and I’ve definitely found that to be true in preparing for this course. I think this experience will also benefit me as I prepare to enter the job market, because employers are always looking for candidates who have demonstrated an ability to pass on their knowledge to others.”

What can you expect from this course?

Students will learn to use the Adobe suite of professional tools as well as R to generate graphs. The emphasis will be on becoming proficient with different tools to produce a wide variety of graphs relevant to biomedical research. Students will also engage with diagrams (e.g., visual methods, flow charts) and compound objects (e.g., posters and graphical abstracts). The class will include weekly constructive group critiques of graphics from the literature and of each other's work.

What if you don’t know anything about R?

Not a problem, you can still take the class! The instructors will hold an additional 1-hour session each week for the first 5 weeks of the semester to bring those with less R experience up to speed. Students already familiar with R can skip the foundational sessions or join those that address less-familiar topics.

In addition to the hands-on components, the course will also cover principles of effective graphic design, ethics of data presentation, and publication standards and practices.

Class will meet 3:00-4:30PM on Thursdays in MSRB 3 room 1125. Assignments include making 1-2 graphics per week. There will be no quizzes, exams, or papers -- just graphics. Grading will be based on participation, including interactive group feedback sessions. Time commitment for homework assignments will average ~1-2 hours per week.

If you are a YR02+ PhD student and want to: (1) gain a solid grounding in the principles and practice of effective graphical design, (2) understand the ethics of communicating data visually, (3) learn to generate graphs using R, and (4) become proficient with using Illustrator to create and edit a wide variety of graphs and diagrams, this may be the class for you!

Students can register for BIOTRAIN 730 in DukeHub. Registration is capped at 20 students so sign up now if you are interested. Reach out to Greg Wray (gwray@duke.edu) or Hannah Devens (hannah.devens@duke.edu) for more information or if you have questions.