Haemosphere Student Intern Project

Introduction

Haemosphere.org is a publicly available database of blood cell gene expression. The haematopoietic research community is a diverse group which contains researchers with various levels of experience in analysing expression data, so we have created this resource to allow easy and fast access to the data for all researchers, and to provide access to the raw data for those who wish to follow up with their own analyses. The main function is that it helps researchers understand which genes are turned on in different blood cell types, by allowing to them to search for their favourite genes, view plots comparing cell types and download data and plots of interest.

We would like to improve the use of this site for the research community by improving the user experience and making sure that it is robust and easy to maintain so that it will be available for the community long term.

Duties while on placement

The Research Software Engineer Intern role will:

• work closely with researchers to identify their needs around data visualization and analysis
• Improve the speed of queries to the database
• Review and improve the maintainability and extensibility of the database
• Integrate interactive plots to the website

There is also a fair amount of flexibility with this project to allow the student to inject their own ideas and introduce new features and functionality.

Skills and Pre-requisites

Skills and Pre-requisites:

• Basic knowledge of Python/Javascript/CSS, databases and Linux command-line
• Ability to learn and understand high-level concepts quickly
• Ability to work independently and to report to a group and discuss theories and results
• Good analytical skills
• Working with git would be an advantage

Benefits for students

Benefits for students whilst undertaking the internship include:

• Each student will get hands on experience in working in an emerging research software environment within a highly regarded medical research institute.
• Gain understanding of how real-world software is assessed, developed and how priorities and requirements are established within a research environment.
• Gain understanding of the importance of maintainable, scalable and extensible code.
• Improving oral and written communication skills in a team environment.