Here you can find some recommended training resources for bioscientists who want to learn computational techniques. If you would like your courses to be included here, please email info@aibio.ac.uk.

For biologists seeking to build strong foundational programming and computational skills we recommend courses from The Carpentries, particularly Software Carpentry and their sister project Data Carpentry. The lessons are designed to be taught as workshops with an instructor. Courses are run regularly, especially for the Core lessons, by institutions all over the world and can often be joined online for free. All materials are also available online and can be followed in a self-directed way.

Software Carpentry is a volunteer project dedicated to teaching basic computing skills to researchers.

The Software Carpentry courses introduce programming concepts, tools and techniques in a very general way. The core curriculum covers the Unix shell and version control with Git, and then branches into Python and R. Additional lessons cover automation and the Make utility, programming with MATLAB, and working with SQL databases.

The Core Lessons cover:

• The Unix Shell
• Version control with Git
• Programming with Python
• Plotting and programming with Python
• Programming with R
• R for Reproducible Scientific Analysis

Additional lessons are available:

• Automation and Make
• Programming with MATLAB
• Using Databases and SQL

The Data Carpentry courses cover fundamental data skills with domain-specific lessons. Some of these can also serve as beginner-level introductions to specific tools or languages.

The most relevant Data Carpentry course for AIBIO is Genomics.

As well as the curated lessons in Software and Data Carpentry, the Carpentries hosts community-developed lessons in two repositories.

The Carpentries Lab contains high-quality, stable, peer-reviewed lessons. Most are submitted by invitation from the Core team. There are currently 7 lessons in the Lab, including a metagenomics course 

The Carpentries Incubator contains community-developed lessons that have not yet been endorsed by the Core team. They may be works in progress, or target a niche topic. Creating lessons in the Incubator provides visibility, as well as systems, processes and training to help the collaborative design process. There are many lessons here on a wide range of interesting topics, but they may not be complete, so be sure to briefly assess lessons in full before undertaking to learn them. 

All community-developed lessons can be browsed in a single table here.

The TeSS platform, developed by Elixir, catalogues training materials and events.

You can browse the materials, sort, and filter by tags like Topic, Difficulty level, and Contributor. Some materials are organised into learning pathways or workflow tasks, where you can follow a set of curated modules to study a specific topic in a progressive way.

The Alan Turing Institute hosts free and open learning resources on data science and AI. Materials are presented in the form of courses, which can be searched and filtered by duration (from 1-5 hours to 31-40 hours) or level (from Introductory to Practitioner). 

The courses are similar to modules one might study as part of a university course. They tend to cover topics delving into either the practicalities or technicalities of applying AI to real-world problems, such as operationalising ethics, assessing and mitigating bias, or understanding the mathematical underpinnings of machine learning. 

You can browse and search the courses here.

EMBL-EBI host both on-demand and live training courses on a wide range of bioscience-related topics. You can browse and search their on-demand courses, or see selections of courses recommended for specific career paths or competencies. 

The main training website is here.

At AIBIO‑UK, we recognise that the rapid growth of biomedical data, accelerated by advances in artificial intelligence, is outpacing our capacity to curate, manage, and reuse it effectively. To help address this challenge, we have collaborated with EMBL‑EBI Training to develop a dedicated training collection focused on AI readiness for the future of biomedical data.

This freely available collection brings together recorded lectures and discussions from AI and bioinformatics experts across academia and industry, with the aim of supporting data generators, data stewards, and data and tools developers in creating and maintaining clean, high‑quality, AI‑ready data. No prior knowledge of bioinformatics is required, although a basic understanding of AI is helpful.

The collection is openly available here and is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. We encourage the community to explore, reuse, and share these resources, while crediting EMBL‑EBI Training and the collection’s authors accordingly.

BlueDot provides free training on Biosecurity, AI safety, and Governance. They also give out grants to support career transitions into the field of AI safety.

The Biosecurity course is designed for engineers and scientists, policy professionals, entrepreneurs, and anyone else interested in building a pandemic-proof world. The course takes 30 hours. It can be studied as a 6 day intensive or part-time over 6 weeks, and is free for all participants.