LEARNING TO CODE AS A NEUROSCIENTIST
Written by Ryan Price
If you are a neuroscientist, whether your day-to-day involves running rats through a
radial arm maze or changing the medium in your stem cells, you might not have had much
experience programming. If you happen to work in genetics, you might have brought some
data to a statistically or computationally inclined person in your lab, or you might be able
to use the browser-based tools so useful to benchside geneticists today: BLAST, UCSC
Genome Browser, etc.
However, many scientists want to
learn to code for themselves but don’t
know where to start. Only very rarely
will a young neuroscientist’s formal
training include programming courses
(I know mine did not). But the immense
advantages available to those who
can code are clear, for both big scary
reasons and small mundane reasons:1.
look good on a CV, and if you learn
web-based languages, you can become an extremely effective communicator by building your own
websites. Also, being able to fluently
generate graphics (for example in R)
will make your presentations stand
out from those created in default
settings of Microsoft Office!
Small mundane reasons:
• Being able to program at a basic level makes data analysis and statistics
immensely easier to perform and
opens up the possibility to automate
analysis, which both decreases the
time spent and reduces the possibility of human error (so long as the
program is written correctly!).
• Fluency in the language of programming will help you collaborate with
computational scientists even if you
decide not to become a bioinformatician.
• It’s a huge advantage generally in
professional life. Programming skills
12 | NEUROMAG | July 2016
Big scary re