Charlotte Francois is a PhD candidate at La Trobe University. She uses computational approaches to understand plant genetic variation in plant-microbe interactions. She is interested in knowledge sharing and community building in the application of technology & statistics in Agricultural/Biological Sciences. Charlotte has been a Digital Research Trainer at Intersect for 3 years and has led six courses during the NCI/Intersect training program. 

In the first two years of her research, Charlotte taught herself R programming techniques. She then attended the Learn to Program: R and Data Manipulation and Visualisation in R at Intersect and applied the techniques she acquired from the courses to her research projects. 

“I had been self-taught, but that obviously, leaves areas that are lacking and doesn't really build a full foundation. Attending the Intersect training helped to patch up those gaps and formed the basis for a lot of the techniques that I am using now.  I am now using R for Quantitative Trait Locus (QTL) Analysis, which involves aligning different datasets of large sizes. Without the programming tools, this wouldn’t be achieved manually on my own.”

Charlotte highlighted that without the programming language courses offered by organisations like Intersect, researchers like herself (a biologist) would not be able to perform the analysis they wish to do. These digital research tools have become an integral part of the research lifecycle of nearly all disciplines and domains, and as such, young researchers ought to embrace these technologies. 

“I also realised that understanding computer programming has given me an additional framework for learning new things. It also provides an extra dimension into problem-solving and therefore, broadens our creativity and horizons about what can be done further.”

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Following the success of the 2022 Training Program, Intersect and NCI commenced the 2023 Training Program in February. To date, we have delivered three hands-on training courses on programming languages; all of which have been well received by the attendees. We continue to meet the training attendees regularly to hear their feedback on the training program. Last month, we talked with Dr Yanran Zhao, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Kirby Institute of the University of New South Wales. 

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