Genome Center graduate student speaks at the Mozilla Foundation

Chris Beitel, a graduate student in the lab of Jonathan Eisen, is giving a talk today at the Mozilla Foundation in San Francisco. His talk title is The science of teaching scientists scientific software development for science and data science and the full abstract is included below. If you are interested, Mozilla will be live-streaming his talk.  

The science of teaching scientists scientific software development for science and data science

Most scientists who write scientific software have no formal training in software development. This is a drain on our collective effectiveness through the production of inefficient software and the loss of man hours to inefficient coding. Imagine you ran a biology research lab. How would you get all of your biologists up to speed on best practices so they could write good software to amplify their laboratory efforts? From square one. That's what I'll be talking about - how to teach / how people learn as well as what needs to be learned in order to build effective teams. This is relevant to the Mozilla audience given the relationship between the Mozilla Science Lab and Software Carpentry, the latter being an organization whose mission is software development education for scientists.