Medical Student Training (Task. 6.2) The Student Selected Component (SSC) of any medical school curriculum worldwide is a taught course that allows students to choose a specific topic in a medically-relevant area of interest to them. The SSC provides an ideal opportunity to formally integrate HPC into the medical curriculum and CompBioMed has delivered an HPC-based molecular medicine SSC at UCL every year since 2017-2018. From 2020-2021 CompBioMed has expanded and now offers this SSC to medical students at the University of Sheffield (USFD), in collaboration with UCL, USFD and associate partner Alces Flight. This work has been highlighted in a State of the Practice talk at SC209. The SSC provides students with a theoretical understanding of the importance of the relationship between human microbiomes – the microorganisms present in and on the human body – and human health and provides them with the practical opportunity to use state of the art computational resources to run a metagenomics pipeline. These courses have run with students collecting their own microbiome data and performing experimental work to determine the microbial sequences that are analysed computationally. During the COVID-19 pandemic, microbiome data from databases were analysed computationally, meaning that we were still capable of running the course. Each year the courses are filled to capacity, showing the interest in and enthusiasm for this area of research. Work is currently being undertaken to
