I received the following inquiry from Thomas Hahn, a visually impaired graduate student seeking an R programming tutor. Anyone interested in working with Thomas can contact him at Thomas.F.Hahn2@gmail.com.
I am a visually impaired bioinformatics graduate student using microarray data for my master’s thesis aimed at deciphering the mechanism by which the yeast wild type can suppress the rise of free reactive oxygen species (ROS) induced by caloric restriction (CR) but the Atg15 and Erg6 knockout mutant cannot.
Since my remaining vision is very limited I need very high magnification. But that makes my visual field very small. Therefore I need somebody to guide me remotely through the R environment and teach me how to best use the R packages for bioinformatics, especially for microarray analysis, next generation sequencing and constructing gene and pathway interaction networks. This is very difficult for me to figure out without assistance because Zoomtext, my magnification and text to speech software, on which I am depending because I am almost blind, has problems reading out aloud many R related websites to me. And even those websites it can read, it can only read sequentially from left to right and then from top to bottom. Unfortunately, this way of acquiring, finding, selecting and processing new information and answering my questions is too tiresome, ineffective and especially way too time consuming for graduating with a PhD in bioinformatics before my funding runs out despite being severely limited by my visual disability.
Since I am legally blind the rehab agency is giving me money to pay tutors for this purpose. Could you please help me getting in touch regarding this with anybody, who could potentially be interested in teaching me R thus saving me time for acquiring new information and skills, which I need to finish my thesis on time, so that I can remain eligible for funding to continue in my bioinformatics PhD program despite being almost blind? The tutoring can be done remotely via TeamViewer 5 and Skype. Hence, it does not matter where my tutors are physically located. Currently I have tutors in Croatia and UK. But since they both work full time jobs while working on their PhD dissertation they only have very limited time to teach me online. Could you therefore please forward this request for help to anybody, who could potentially be interested or, who could connect me to somebody, who might be, because my graduation and career depend on it? Who else would you recommend me to contact regarding this?
I thank you very much in advance for your thoughts, ideas, suggestions, recommendations, time, help, efforts and support.
With very warm regards,
Thomas Hahn
If you don't already know about it, http://journal.r-project.org/archive/2013-1/godfrey.pdf is worth a read