Hackbio and my Bioinformatics Journey

Published in

HackBio

3 min readSep 6, 2020

I am Stephen Kanyerezi, a Ugandan as well as a bioinformatics intern at the African Centre of Excellence, Infectious Disease Institute at Makerere University. I am passionate about Genomics and bioinformatics

My Journey to Bioinformatics

During my earlier studies, I had a huge interest in biology which I later lost to the physical sciences. Albeit losing interest in biology, I took on a biology-related course at the University, Biomedical Laboratory Technology. Here, I continued to do the course with the aim of just passing and not getting the skills.

At the completion of the course in May 2019, I met Dr. Gerald Mboowa, currently my mentor, who introduced me to the world of bioinformatics. Here, my passion for bioinformatics immensely increased as he took me through intensive programming as well as encouraging me to take on various online bioinformatics related courses hence filling in the knowledge gap.

Hackbio internship

Coming across the hackbio virtual internship advert via twitter calling out for applications, got me thinking that this was the opportunity to apply the skills I had so far gained as well as gain experience and acquire new skills. I was extremely happy to be among those selected to participate in the internship. This was not only going to enable me to apply my skills and gain experience but also an opportunity to network and collaborate with great scientists all over the globe.

The first stage of the internship scared me a little bit. We were required to join Slack teams and equally advertise for our teams so that we could get more members. For the first few days, I was alone and later joined by two other members of which all of us were promoted to the next stage.

I was then promoted through the various stages up to the final stages where I met a team of individuals blessed with different skills. I would like to thank all the members of the genomics-two team for the collaboration they put up but more so Maruf — the multi-talented, Winfred, Caroline, Karan, and Giwa.

Gains

The internship has taken five weeks but it equipped me with a lot of skills and experience which without the internship, would take one more than a year to acquire them. Some of the skills I have gained include; Use of a version control system, transcriptomics analysis, and above all, communication and collaboration.