BMR 617: Statistical Techniques for the Biomedical Sciences

This course is intended for students in the Biomedical Research Ph.D. program. Students in this course will learn the basics of data exploration, presentation, and analysis suitable for biomedical researchers. We will focus on interpretation of data, and on presenting results in a form suitable for publication in peer-reviewed manuscripts.

Class time:
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 10-10:50 am.
Class meeting room:
Byrd Biotechnology and Science Center Room 102

Course director and instructor: James Denvir, Ph.D.
Office:
BBSC 336R
Phone:
304-696-7327

Course instructor: Andrew Nato, Ph.D.
Office:
BBSC 336F
Phone:
304-696-3562

Course instructor: Sadia Akter, Ph.D.
Office:
BBSC 336M
Phone:
304-696-3782

This course will use online materials; there is no text book. Class time will typically involve students sharing material they about which they were confused or had questions, with discussion, and a preview by the instructor(s) of the material to be covered before the next class.
Students will use the R statistical computing environment for data analysis and visualization. For help with R and RStudio, use the R Resources button on the navigation bar, in addition to material provided in class.
We will follow the "Introductory statistics with R" training module which is part of the online training modules provided by the WV-INBRE grant. Unless stated "In Class", you should go through the specified page before class, and be ready to ask questsions and discuss the material in class time. The schedule is shown below and will be updated as the course progresses:
DateMaterial
January 12th, 2026 Course introduction and syllabus
January 14th, 2026 Installing R, RStudio, and packages. (In class)
January 16th, 2026 Types of variable.
January 21st, 2026 Exploring Distributions
January 23th 2026 The Normal Distribution
January 26th 2026 Data Wrangling
January 28th 2026 Introduction to graphing with ggplot2
February 2nd 2026 Relative and Attributable Risk
February 4th 2026 Correlation
February 6th 2026 Color Schemes in R
February 9th 2026 Probability and Bayes' Theorem
February 11th 2026 Samples and the Central Limit Theorem
February 13th 2026 Point estimation of the mean and introduction to confidence intervals
February 16th 2026 Confidence Intervals
February 18th 2026 Confidence intervals for proportions
February 20th 2026 Hypothesis Testing
February 23rd 2026 Hypothesis testing for a single proportion
February 25th 2026 Data tables and contingency tables in R
February 27th 2026 Comparing Proportions
March 2nd 2026 Comparing Means
March 4th 2026 The assumption of normally-distributed data
March 6th 2026 One Way ANOVA
March 9th 2026 Post Hoc Tests for ANOVA
March 11th 2026 Two-Way ANOVA
March 13th 2026 Interactions in Two-Way ANOVA
March 23rd 2026 Exponential Growth
March 25th 2026 Normalization
March 27th 2026 Analyzing real-time PCR data
March 30th 2026 Linear Regression
April 1st 2026 Sample Size and Power
April 3rd 2026 Multiple Hypothesis Testing
April 6th 2026 Multiple Linear Regression
April 8th 2026 Linear Models
April 10th 2026 R Notebooks
April 13th-23rd 2026 Analyzing RNA-Sequencing data
May 1st 2026 Summary
AssignmentDue DateModel solutionR code
Installing R and R studio:
  • Home page and download for R (install R first from here)
  • R Studio (install the free version of R Studio from here, after installing R)
These are some (of very many) free online tutorials available which make good background reading: