The Bioinformatics Consulting Group (BCG) offers expert support in bioinformatics, biostatistics, and biocomputing - providing standard and custom analyses, applying best practices for commonly used open-source tools and adapting methods to fit each project’s data and research goals.
Getting Started
Step 1: Review our Services and Rates
See our Bioinformatics Services & Rates page for detailed service descriptions, pipelines, and pricing.
Step 2: Schedule a Consultation
Email the BCG Consultants with a brief description of your project and analysis needs.
Consulting Models & Support Levels
BCG offers flexible consulting models to support projects of all sizes. To get started or ensure consultant availability, email us to schedule a consultation.
One-off Consultations
Meet with a consultant for up to one hour to discuss questions in bioinformatics, biocomputing, experimental design, or analysis strategy.
Hourly Projects
Hire a consultant on an hourly basis for well-defined tasks such as data analysis, pipeline development, troubleshooting, or scripting support.
Long-Term Projects
For research groups needing sustained or collaborative support, consultants can be engaged for a fixed percentage of their time over an agreed-upon period.
Full-Service Pipelines
BCG can perform standardized “best practices” analyses at a minimal fee. These pipelines use widely cited, open-source tools tailored to your data and research questions.
Detailed pipeline descriptions and pricing are available on the Facility Wiki.
UT Bioinformatics Community
The Center for Biomedical Research Support offers support for researchers using computational approaches to study biological problems:
Byte Club
This club shares tricks and tips, and ways to resolve common bioinformatics issue. Monthly meetings typically include a short talk followed by general discussion about new tools, brief how-to tutorials, pipelines, publications and more.
Interested in attending or speaking at upcoming meeting? Contact BCG.
BioITeam
The BioITeam (short for bioinformatics team) serves as a consortium of bio-computing scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and is comprised of scientists from the Bioinformatics Research Computing Facility, the Bioinformatics Consulting Group, the Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology, Genomic Sequencing and Analysis Facility, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, and Department of Statistics and Data Sciences. Visit our Wiki for useful tools and updates.
Collaboratorium Workspace
The Collaboratorium (located in FNT 1.202) is shared workspace where anyone can learn, work on, or discuss bioinformatics alongside consultants and peers engaged in similar projects . For more information, or to reserve the space for a special event, contact BCG.
Some potential uses of the Collaboratorium:
- Work on a bioinformatic analysis with members of your lab, or across labs, and would like to utilize a space to meet and work together.
- Spend some time after an appointment with a bioinformatics consultant to try out what you just discussed, before you head back to the lab.
- A quiet space to to concentrate and work.
Staff
Dhivya Arasappan, M.S. – Co-Director
Dhivya Arasappan has more than 15 years of experience analyzing NGS data from multiple platforms. Her areas of expertise include RNA-seq, specifically involving large-scale brain expression datasets and co-expression network analysis, de novo gene assembly, particularly using hybrid sequencing data. She is also the research educator for the Big Data in Biology Freshman Research Initiative stream. Key publications
Email: darasappan@austin.utexas.edu
Office: FNT 1.206C
Anna Battenhouse, B.S., B.A. – Associate Research Scientist
Anna Battenhouse has extensive has extensive experience working with next-generation sequencing (NGS) data, particularly in RNA-seq, Tag-Seq, ChIP-seq and ATAC-seq analyses. She develops NGS analysis scripts and workflows, leads the Biomedical Research Computing Facility, and is a research scientist in the lab of Edward Marcotte.
Email: abattenhouse@utexas.edu
Matt Bramble, M.S., M.A. – Research Engineering/Scientist Associate
Matt Bramble joined the CBRS team after six years working at MD Anderson Cancer Center analyzing a wide range of NGS data in epigenomics. His areas of expertise includes Hi-C (chromatin conformation) analysis, mouse somatic variant analysis, and single cell RNAseq analysis. He has 10 years of experience in computational data analysis as well as master’s degrees from UT in molecular biology and statistics. Key publications
Dennis Wylie, Ph.D. – Co-Director
Dennis Wylie joined the Bioinformatics group in 2015 after seven years in industry where he worked as a computational biologist. His primary expertise is in statistical and machine learning approaches for biomarker discovery, pathway analysis, classification and regression modeling and biological sequence analysis. He also has extensive experience in a wide variety of -omics analyses. Key publications