Learning Bioinformatics @ UCLA: The Undergraduate Bioinformatics Minor

As of Fall 2012, UCLA undergraduates in any major can obtain a Bioinformatics minor.

 

The Bioinformatics minor introduces undergraduate students to the emerging interdisciplinary field of Bioinformatics, an active area of research at UCLA combining elements of the Computational Sciences with the Biological Sciences. The minor organizes the many course offerings in different UCLA departments into a coherent course plan providing undergraduate students with significant training in bioinformatics in addition to the training they obtain from their major. Students who complete the minor will be strong candidates for admission to Ph.D. programs in bioinformatics as well as have the relevant training to obtain jobs in the biotechnology industry.

 

Students in the minor complete a core curriculum and an elective course. Students are strongly encouraged to participate in undergraduate research as early as possible in one of the many research groups offering research opportunities in Bioinformatics.

 

More information about the Bioinformatics Minor is available below and at:

http://www.bioinformatics.ucla.edu/minor/

Computational Genetics Course Winter 2013

Computational Genetics is a UCLA course taught every year which is cross listed between Computer Science and Human Genetics.  The course is a combined undergraduate and graduate course.  The course covers the design and analysis of genome wide association studies and computational methods for the analysis of next generation sequencing technologies.  While those topics form the content of the course, the goal of the course are to provide  training in interdisciplinary computational analysis.  The goal is to learn how to identify computational problems in other fields and solve them to make a contribution without an extensive background in the field.  In this case, the focus is genetics, but students can apply what they learn to other areas as well.  A big part of the course is an open ended final project which provides both experience and training similar to participating in a research project.  There is a choice of 20+ possible projects that the students get to choose from.

 

The course started with 13 people in 2007 when it was first offered and how has close to 100.  All of the materials including videos of the lectures, videos of the discussions (led by group member and TA Jae-Hoon Sul), lecture slides and other materials are available online.  The URL is http://genetics.cs.ucla.edu/cs124/

 

Feel free to use any of the resources to both learn the material and include parts of it in your courses.  We would love to hear from you if you find these materials useful.