27/07/2026
A new post from our series "NGSchool: Where Research Meets Community" where we share the stories of our participants 🫂💕
Today, let's hear from Kateřina Večerková, a PhD student in Bioinformatics at the Institute of Molecular Genetics, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague.
NGSchool came at exactly the right moment for me. I was in my second year of my PhD, deep in a single-cell RNA-seq analysis of hematopoietic stem cells, and completely stuck. The cells refused to cluster meaningfully and I had been struggling for weeks.
Then during Diana's session on single-cell analysis, she mentioned checking whether the cells cluster on cell-cycle effect. I checked my own data right there in the classroom, and of course that was exactly what was happening. That one insight unblocked months of work. Once I removed the cell cycle effect, the analysis came together, and I could present the project at several conferences. It’s not an exaggeration to say NGSchool changed the trajectory of that project.
What drew me to apply was the programme. My background is entirely in bioinformatics, so I wasn’t expecting to learn fundamentals. But honestly, the range of methods covered was genuinely impressive: Hi-C, single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, long-read sequencing, clonal repertoir analysis in immunology, and more, all taught by people who actively work on these methods. The format made all the difference too. Every session was hands-on with real data, which gives you a completely different level of understanding than sitting through a lecture.
The skills I’ve put to use most directly came from the single-cell and spatial transcriptomics sessions. Since NGSchool, I’ve also written a long-read sequencing article for Vesmír, a Czech popular science journal and I’m planning an international internship where I’ll be working on long-read single-cell data and applying machine learning methods I got exposure to at the school.
The project is co-financed by the governments of Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants from the International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.
