The BecA-ILRI Hub seeks to strengthen the capacity of the African scientific community, to conduct bioscience research and significantly contribute to improved agricultural products that can enhance livelihoods of farmers in the region.

As part of this capacity building programme, the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), USA, in collaboration with the BecA-ILRI Hub, will hold a training workshop on Advanced Bioinformatics from 22nd – 28th August 2013. The workshop aims to provide a learning forum for researchers in bioinformatics, computational biology as well as scientists utilizing computational methods in their research.

We are seeking applicants from East and Central Africa who require advanced skills in Bioinformatics to support their research. We will select 25 graduate students and early career researchers, based on evidence of productive research and relevance of training to current research and who are engaged in agricultural research within a national research institute or university.

Selected participants will attend an intensive 5-day workshop at the BecA-ILRI Hub in Nairobi, Kenya. The program includes comprehensive lectures and hands-on training sessions in Next generation sequencing technologies and it's applications to infectious diseases, metagenomics and microbiome analysis–tools and computational approaches to studying viral genomes.

A team of creditable facilitators from the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI-USA), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and BecA-ILRI Hub (Kenya) will conduct the training sessions.