The USU Bio Nerd Herd is a programming group that meets regularly (weekly or fortnightly, depending on our schedule) in the Pearse Lab (BNR 132) on Fridays at 4pm. It’s open to undergraduates, graduate students, post-docs… anyone who’s interested in trying out biological programming and learning something new. Oh yes, we also eat pizza and go to Buffalo Wild Wings quite a lot!
Each meeting is different, but we often have talks from people outside the group, perhaps describing some biological programming they’ve conducted to help them in their research, or coming to us to figure out the solution to a problem they’re facing. Each semester we work towards a Day of Code, where we all sit down and try to create something that other people will find useful! Last semester, we created an R package that builds a trait database with over 3,500,000 pieces of data, and we’re submitting a manuscript describing it to a peer-reviewed journal.
If you’re interested, send an email to will.pearse@usu.edu. You can, of course, just turn up, but it might be best to check the schedule and make sure you know what we’re doing that week (we might be going out for pizza!).
Take a look at our two current projects - Not A Trait DataBase and Not A Community DataBase!