May 14, 2020

HPI Skill-sharing in RStudio: Trainees offer multiple workshops for beginning coders

By Chenhua Li, PhD student, (Wasmuth lab, UCalgary)

Dr. Mareike Janiak and Shasta Webb, PhD Candidate, both from Dr. Amanda Melin’s lab offered two great RStudio workshops on April 30th and May 14th online for a broad audience, including HPI trainees.

In the first workshop, they covered a great detail on basics like how to download R and RStudio, RStudio user interface, R markdown file, R libraries, and how to manipulate your own data frame. In the second workshop, they introduced the very widely used and popular R plotting package, ggplot2. Mareike and Shasta showed us step-by-step from the very beginning on how to generate different publication-ready figures in R.

The workshops were clear, helpful, and easy to understand. Marieke and Shasta were also really patient with answering all of our questions during the workshop. They also offered office hours via Zoom Meeting the next day for any extra questions. These two workshops were great for any level of expertise, as they also covered fun things you can do with R. For example, how to make a scatter plot with cat images as each data point using the "add_cat" function.

Overall, the workshops were interesting and with a great deal of detailed information! Thanks so much to Marieke and Shasta for their generosity of their time and talents. I’ll be looking forward to future workshops offered by Dr. Mareike Janiak and Shasta Webb! 😊