As I type this, four of my colleagues are kicking off a workshop in Taipei, hosted by Taiwan's National Applied Research Laboratories (NARLabs). For the next four days, they will be leading a cohort of ~40 participants through everything from core concepts to practical details involved in understanding and applying the GATK Best Practices for variant discovery. They will alternate between lectures and hands-on exercises, covering all current GATK workflows (germline and somatic short variants, plus somatic CNVs) as well as the pipelining systems that we recommend. And for the first time they'll be doing all of it with GATK4. Whoo! We've been working on this new formula and the updated materials for several months so as far as I'm concerned it's the most exciting event that I'm unable to attend this year...
But this is only the first of many workshops! In a few weeks, another workshop crew will be traveling to Montreal to deliver the same training course at McGill University. In April, I'll be taking a crew to Beijing, hosted by Intel China, which I'm really looking forward to given how much is happening in the genomics space over there; among other cool prospects I'm thrilled that we're going to get to try out the brand new Cromwell backend developed by Alibaba Cloud for running GATK pipelines in China. We're also working on scheduling another workshop in early May in Qatar, and we already have a couple of others scheduled in July (Cambridge UK) and September (Seville, Spain). Possibly others TBD, stay tuned...
You can find a complete list of upcoming scheduled workshops (including registration links where available) on our Events calendar page, and/or read more about the workshop program itself here.