To start my first ever blog post, I should mention that I am not a data scientist. I’m a microbiologis by training. But like many scientific fields, microbiology is becominge more data-centric. Every day (it seems), new technologies emerge that generate tons of data including genome sequencing and microarrays. About 7 months ago, I was hired by a research group that contracted out numerous samples to be sequenced/analyzed and they were sitting on the data because they had 0 clue how to analyze it.