Trainee Insights-Learning to Navigate the World of Bioinformatics

By Benjamin Packer, 2026 Summer Bioinformatics Research Program Participant

I love working in a research lab; it’s an investigative experience where you constantly learn and are actively finding new and clever ways to identify molecular pathways or modulators in disease-related processes. Throughout my research experiences in undergrad and postgrad, I learned how to work with samples delicately and thoughtfully select experiments to run to prove my hypothesis. I became extremely familiar with the scientific process, but to become as self-sufficient as possible, I needed to approach a daunting aspect of research: data analysis and using analytical software. It was a fear of mine for a while: coding to analyze data, ensuring I was running the correct statistical tests, knowing which statistical tests to run, and much more. I usually have the worst luck with computers and technology; I still have a home button on my iPhone (despite being born in the 2000s, working with this technology still goes over my head). With the rise and the scientific power of -omics datasets, I knew that this was a battle I needed to win soon, so I looked for opportunities to learn these analytical tools and strengthen my computational skills.

The Summer Bioinformatics Research Program (SBRP) through the RNA Institute at the University at Albany provided a beautifully crafted opportunity to learn computational tools to enhance my research, analyze large transcriptomic datasets, and then apply my newfound knowledge to a research project to gain independence with these tools. In this program, we learn Linux, RStudio and the command line through the terminal. We used these tools to complete high-performance computing tasks such as sequence alignment to then generate statistical results, which we then used to create a variety of figures to visualize differences in alternative splicing, differential gene expression, or pathway enrichment in our datasets. At the end of the program, I had the pleasure of attending the RNA Day celebration, where I was able to present a poster on the independent research I completed, network with RNA Institute scientists and program members, learn about my cohort’s research projects and discuss more about the initiatives and projects at the RNA Institute. Overall, “enjoyable” would be an understatement to describe my experience with the SBRP.

The ability to analyze these large datasets to understand large-scale molecular changes occurring invisibly to the naked eye is fascinating. Being able to use multiple tools at once on these datasets is amazing; you can really create a comprehensive picture of perturbations on different molecular processes all from a handful of datasets. Learning these tools and participating in this program exponentially improved my confidence in working in the sciences and my understanding in experimental design and research direction. I highly recommend this experience to anyone interested in bioinformatics or pursuing a graduate degree in the life sciences.