Scientific Computing
Ticket: T02 due Jan 20 by 11:59 pm
Biology has left the test tube. Today, the most groundbreaking discoveries, from folding proteins with AI to mapping the evolutionary history of viruses, do not happen on a laboratory bench. They happen in the cloud, on supercomputers, and in the terminal. To operate in this new world, you need more than a hypothesis. You need a Science Stack.
In a traditional “wet lab,” you rely on a standardized set of physical tools: pipettes, centrifuges, and reagents. If you do not know how to calibrate a pipette, your experiment fails. The “dry lab” is no different. The Science Stack is our digital toolkit. It is the collection of programming languages, file formats, libraries, and visualization tools that we use to perform scientific computing.
This brief introduces the industry-standard tools that power modern computational biology. Our goal is to move you away from the “scripting” mindset and toward the Research Software Engineering mindset. We do not just run code; we build robust, reproducible pipelines that generate truth.