FSEA EQUIPS POSTGRADUATE STUDENTS AND EMERGING RESEARCHERS WITH STATISTICAL ANALYTICAL SKILLS

The Faculty of Science, Engineering and Agriculture (FSEA) initiated a weekly series of workshops for postgraduate students and emerging researchers aimed at developing their skills in data management using the powerful R Statistical Software. The R statistical tool is freely available online. The tool is capable of handling complex and large data sets, such as those available from various public and open data repositories or metabolomics data files, among others. In general, desktop computers offer convenient platforms to perform the associated intensive computations without crashing easily.

The workshop covers mainly R syntax, concepts of objects, vectors, data types, visualisation of data distributions in R, normality tests, plotting various graphs and charts using R, correlations, principal component analysis, networks and pathway diagrams, among other topics. These skills are critical for scientific publications and thesis production. This week, the first batch of 24 participants was largely from the department of Microbiology and Biochemistry as well as Biology, Chemistry, Food Science and Technology, Geography and Environmental Science. The participants utilised the desktop computers in the Agriculture Computer Lab. The chief resource person is Mr Maltase Mutanda (Unisa / UNIVEN), assisted by Mr Dipoo Mashifane (Department of Plant and Soil Sciences at UNIVEN), who both have extensive experience with the software. Mr. Mutanda is currently hosted jointly by Prof Madala (Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology) and Prof Gwata (Department of Plant and Soil Sciences). His doctoral research project under the supervision of Dr Figlan (Unisa) and Prof Gwata involves mutagenesis of finger millet and metabolomic analysis. It is anticipated that at least 140 staff and postgraduate students will receive the training by year-end. The faculty, under the leadership of Prof Potgieter, is consistently positioning UNIVEN as a key player in modern applied cross-cutting research and training, as well as the expansion of academic networks nationally and internationally.

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Department of Marketing, Branding and Communication
University of Venda
Tel: 082 868 2218 / 082 868 1811