Hi! I'm Tommy Tang
I am a bioinformatician/computational biologist with six years of wet lab experience and over 12 years of computation experience. I will help you to learn computational skills to tame astronomical data and derive insights. Check out the resources I offer below and sign up for my newsletter!
How I Would Learn Bioinformatics From Scratch 12 Years Later: A Roadmap
Hello Bioinformatics lovers, First of all, thanks to all the subscribers and I hope you get value from this newsletter. I want to shout out to Krittiyabhorn (Namthip), a PhD student in Thailand. Her journey should be an inspiration for all of you. Just get started! read her post here. And make sure you check out her blog posts too. They are all well-written and attending to details. The best way to learn is to "just play around". Unfortunately, many of the students just do not get started....
The Bioinformatics Tool You’re Using Might Be a Waste of Time – Here’s Why
Hello, Bioinformatics lovers and new subscribers, Tommy here. It is March, can you believe it? Boston had heavy snow last week and we finally got a little warmer. The snow is finally melting! Spring is near, I guess. It is my pleasure to distribute my bioinformatics knowledge through this newsletter. btw, I am adding video tutorials replicating the genomics paper in this playlist. Remember 1% better a day, that's a lot of progress in a year! If you find it helpful, kindly forward it to your...
Why I told a conference organizer I'm NOT an AI expert
Hello Bioinformatics lovers, I told a conference organizer that I do not consider myself an expert in AI, and she was surprised. AI is a buzzword word and it is spreading like wildfire in our lives (I can not live without ChatGPT) But bioinformatics existed before AI is cool. Most of my daily work is: formulating the biological question. (This is the hardest) finding the right data to answer it. if no such data is available, work with the wet lab team to generate them after getting the data,...
The Hardest Part of Bioinformatics? an under-rated skill you will learn in this newsletter
Hello Bioinformatics lovers, Another week passed by. I often feel how time flies. When I look at how fast my three kids grow, I realize how "old" I became. whew...I will turn 40 next year! I started learning bioinformatics at 28. The other day I went to a Chinese restaurant and got this fortune cookie message: Every once in a while, we all need the encouragement I think it is awesome to be a cheerleader for those who want to learn bioinformatics. I knew I needed it when I started. Technical...
How Unrelated Skills Shaped My Bioinformatics Career (You Won’t Expect This)
Hello Bioinformatics lovers, Tommy here again. Do you feel eager to receive my emails on Saturdays? At least, it now become my habit. I will open the email and fire it up. Today, I will share how seemingly unrelated skills shaped my bioinformatics career. ( I will have all my week's long posts linked in the end too). I never set out to be a bioinformatician. In fact, I started my career at the bench, pipetting away in a wet lab, studying epigenetics in cancer. Back then, I had no idea that a...
Why Bioinformatics is complicated
Hello Bioinformatics lovers, I can not believe it is already the second month of 2025! I want to grab every opportunity to remind you that it is never too late to start learning. ( I wrote this tutorial to show you how to analyze TCGA bulk RNAseq data, Enjoy! ) For those who celebrate the Lunar New Year, Happy New Year! It is the year of the snake. My wife wrote the couplets: Upper couplet: The Snake breathes auspicious energy, bringing peace and fortune to the home.Lower couplet: Wealth...
Mastering the Essentials of Bioinformatics
Dear Bioinformatics lovers, Looking at bioinformaticians’ profiles today, it seems like everyone is immersed in cutting-edge single-cell analyses and AI-driven bioinformatics. It’s inspiring to see how far the field has come, but amidst all the buzz, something crucial is often overlooked—the fundamentals of bioinformatics. Why Fundamentals Still Matter Basic bioinformatics skills, like exploratory data analysis (EDA) and data sanity checks, seem to be losing the spotlight. Everyone’s talking...
R, Python, or Unix? The Bioinformatics Toolkit You Need
Hello Bioinformatics lovers, Whether you're just starting or deep into bioinformatics, one question always looms large:Which tools should you master first? R vs Python: Which Should You Learn? Many beginners ask me this, and honestly, the answer depends on your needs. Let me share my journey: I started learning Unix commands over a decade ago, followed by Python through Python for Absolute Beginners. While Python taught me programming fundamentals (like print("hello world")), it wasn’t...
It's here! end to end tutorial to replicate a genomics figure
Hello Bioinformatics lovers, Ten days into 2025, how are you executing your goals? I am committed to posting a long-form post every day in 2025. Below you can find the links to the posts from the past week. I promised to write an end-to-end tutorial to replicate a genomics figure during the holidays. It is now here! https://crazyhottommy.github.io/reproduce_genomics_paper_figures/ If you are curious about what I used to make the website, it is workflowr https://github.com/workflowr/workflowr....
How to achieve your New year's goal to learn bioinformatics?
Hello Bioinformatics lovers, Happy New Year! It is 2025 already. That means it is time to set up your goals. To achieve your goals, this is the framework: Eliminate the distractions, take actions, find an efficient way to do it, maintain the efficiency So, you need to get rid of the distractions and take action Now! For example, I have told you many times to build yourself a website to showcase your bioinformatics portfolio. How many of you have done that? (Thanks to those who sent me your...
I am a bioinformatician/computational biologist with six years of wet lab experience and over 12 years of computation experience. I will help you to learn computational skills to tame astronomical data and derive insights. Check out the resources I offer below and sign up for my newsletter!