Updates and plans from the Bioconductor Training Committee

The Bioconductor Training Committee has had a successful past year and many plans for the next. One of our main accomplishments, Carpentries-style workshop materials, were used for in-person workshops covering Intro to R and Bulk RNA-Seq in Kenya, Ethiopia and Benin, while the Bulk RNA-Seq and Single Cell RNA-Seq workshops were offered before EuroBioC2025 in Spain. This year a new workshop, Microbiome Analysis, is being developed and will be held before EuroBioC2026 in Finland. Additionally, the Training Committee has partnered with Physalia for online workshops taught by experienced members of the Bioconductor community, with two free seats available for participants from under-represented countries. As a follow-up to our recent publication on “Learning and teaching biological data science in the Bioconductor community” (Drnevich, Tan et al. 2025), we are exploring the development of an ELIXIR Training eSupport System (TeSS) Space for a centralised, Bioconductor-focused view of training materials, videos, event listings, and  specific “learning paths” highlighting which workshops, package vignettes and/or other training materials would be useful for a particular analysis goal. Committee member Kevin Rue-Albrecht has been awarded a Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship for “Improving Software Discoverability in the Life Sciences - Building Bridges between Bioconductor and the EDAM ontology” and also a BioFAIR Pathfinder Project “Connecting Bioconductor, Galaxy, and nf-core: FAIR, AI-ready workflows and training for single-cell analysis.” Both of these initiatives will strengthen connections between Bioconductor and two other major bioinformatics platforms to improve the visibility, accessibility, and reuse of complementary software and training materials across life science communities. We also consider how the increasing use of AI tools by learners may affect training, including their use for code generation and pair programming, and how to ensure that this does not replace core learning activities or undermine skills in statistical reasoning, reproducibility, and critical evaluation of results. Finally, the Training Committee developed governance documents to formalize co-chair elections and terms, and define other members’ roles. We encourage any interested community member to join the Training Committee’s monthly meetings and help out however they can.