profile

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!

Feel like you're falling behind in bioinformatics? Read this.

Hello Bioinformatics lovers, Tommy here. It is a long weekend here in the US. Make sure you take a break and do some activities with your family. Below is something I feel myself too. We all get overwhelmed If you've ever felt overwhelmed in bioinformatics—like you're constantly behind, like everyone else is ahead—you’re not alone. Let me show you why that feeling isn’t failure.It’s the nature of the field. In 2012, I started learning bioinformatics.Back then, ChIP-seq was the shiny new...

New post from chatomics! Multi-Omics Integration Strategy and Deep Diving into MOFA2

Hello Bioinformatics lovers, I enabled my blog https://divingintogeneticsandgenomics.com/#posts RSS feed. So whenever I have a new blog post, it will be sent to your email. This is different from my weekly Saturday newsletter. My blog posts are mostly technical tutorials. This is new update from my blog: Multi-Omics Integration Strategy and Deep Diving into MOFA2 Published on May 17, 2025 Today’s guest blog post on multiOmics integration is written by Aditi Qamra and edited by Tommy. Aditi is...

The Biologist Who Uses AI Will Replace You

Hello Bioinformatics lovers, Tommy here. It was Mother's Day last weekend. Did you call her? I did, and I do it every week for > 1 hour. I wrote a post about it here. Just be a listener I am not going to teach you how to be a good son or daughter today:) I am going to talk about Bioinformatics! Let’s get one thing clear: AI won’t replace you. But a biologist using AI? They absolutely will. Especially in bioinformatics—where the questions never stop coming. Back in 2013, when I got stuck on...

The Script They Wouldn’t Share—and Why I Never Forgot It

Hello Bioinformatics lovers, Tommy here. I thought Boston skipped Spring and ran into Summer last week. It suddenly became chilly again this week.. It is already May! But nothing is colder than "You figure it out yourself" when.. That hurts! I asked a senior labmate for help when I started bioinformatics.They refused to share their script. Like it was gold.That stung. I was new. Drowning in FASTQ files. Bash was foreign. They had the solution. But all I got was: “Figure it out yourself.” That...

New post from chatomics! Exploring Spatial Transcriptomics A Dive into Visium Data Analysis in Python

Hello Bioinformatics lovers, I enabled my blog https://divingintogeneticsandgenomics.com/#posts RSS feed. So whenever I have a new blog post, it will be sent to your email. This is different from my weekly Saturday newsletter. My blog posts are mostly technical tutorials. This is new update from my blog: Exploring Spatial Transcriptomics A Dive into Visium Data Analysis in Python Published on May 3, 2025 Why guest posting? I want to write more hands-on tutorials, but I realized: I am not an...

Matrix Factorization: The Secret Language of Gene Expression

Hello Bioinformatics lovers, Tommy here. Summer is finally here in Boston! I look forward to more outdoor activities with the kids. Okay, let's get into today's topic: Matrix Factorization Matrix algebra used to feel abstract. Something from a dusty textbook. All symbols, no meaning. Then I applied it to biology. And suddenly, it was everywhere—in my RNA-seq pipelines, my proteomics scripts, even single-cell analysis. Let me show you what changed. The Matrix Is the Foundation of -Omics...

Seven Books for you to learn bioinformatics

Hello Bioinformatics lovers, It was my birthday on April 24th. I gave a PCA and CCA for a single-cell annotation workshop on the same day. It is pretty meaningful for me to distribute knowledge on a special day. You should go and follow the step-by-step tutorial here https://divingintogeneticsandgenomics.com/talk/2025-pythia-cell-anno/ Today's newsletter is simple: seven books to learn bioinformatics. 1. Data Analysis for the Life Sciences https://leanpub.com/dataanalysisforthelifesciences...

Heatmaps Are Lying to You (Unless You Understand These 2 Things)

Hello Bioinformatics lovers,How is your learning going? Are you learning a bit more than yesterday? The past week was challenging for me. Two sick kids and a sick wife. Three extracted wisdom teeth did not stop bleeding I had them fixed, going back to the dental office, and then I became sick. (If you have kids, you know how it works when one of them is sick...) However, I still got quite a bit done. I made this video for the ChIP-seq analysis tutorial in the playlist. Okay, let's talk about...

From Wet Lab to Code: Why Biologists Should Embrace Data and AI (But Carefully)

Hi Bioinformatics lovers, How are you doing? It is April, but it still feels like winter here in Boston. It makes us warm that we hosted Josh Starmer (you should go and check out his Statquest YouTube video on statistics and machine learning) at our home. I even got his "The StatQuest Illustrated Guide to Neural Networks and AI" book signed by him! Our kids had a lot of fun playing UNO with him. Tripple BAM Okay, let's dive into our topic today: Learn coding and AI. I used to be just like...

This Bioinformatics Mistake Costs Labs Thousands (But You Can Avoid It)

Hello Bioinformatics lovers, Tommy here. Welcome, all the new subscribers! Today's newsletter is a little late. I usually write it the day before and send it out early Saturday morning. The previous week and coming weeks are super busy, and I have a presentation every week.I still get nervous when I give a presentationEven after 17 years in the US. And it is NORMAL. Okay, let's dive into today's topic. The communication between Bioinformatician and wet lab scientists. Avoid This Costly Lab...

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!