Computer-aided research has become vitally important in all facets of both the academic setting and industrial workplace. This course introduces a selection of valuable tools and techniques in this modern domain with a focus on practical, hands-on skill-building. The course covers four principal areas (all in the context of chemical, biological, materials, or engineering problems): 1. Scientific scripting and computing (in particular Python and its various modules); 2. Applied data analysis and mining (including materials informatics, cheminformatics); 3. Molecular and materials modeling, computational chemistry; 4. Visualization of data and results.