Bioinformatics

To provide students with theoretical foundations and practical understanding of computational techniques in the study of molecular biology; to prepare for careers in biotechnology or the pharmaceutical industry, or for further advanced research work.

Our programme reflects bioinformatics as a multidisciplinary field involving research, development and application of computational tools for storing, organising and analysing the large amounts of biomolecular data now available (eg genomic, gene expression arrays, protein-protein interactions, protein and nucleic acid structures).

Examples of topics covered are algorithm design and analysis in computational molecular biology; protein structure analysis and prediction; introduction to statistics for bioinformaticians; microarray data analysis; protein/gene interaction networks; systems biology methods. In addition, students with a biology background will be introduced to programming and computer science and students with a computational background will be introduced to molecular biology.

We require students to complete an individual project to be eligible for the MSc degree.