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  Graduate School–New Brunswick 2010–2012 Programs, Faculty, and Courses Computational Biology and Molecular Biophysics 118 Program  

Program


Making sense of the ever-increasing amount and scope of biological information--at levels of complexity ranging from molecules, through assemblies of molecules, to cells--requires sophisticated mathematical and computational tools and concepts outside the realm of mainstream biology. The graduate program in computational biology and molecular biophysics seeks to train a new generation of scientists to use these tools and concepts to achieve a new level of understanding of biology. The graduate program will be administered under the umbrella of the BioMaPS Institute for Quantitative Biology, the goal of which is to foster interdisciplinary research and education at the interface between biology and the mathematical and physical sciences. The institute faculty has been built on a critical mass of prominent investigators in two major areas of interdisciplinary biomedicine: structural biology and systems biology and bioinformatics. A major goal of the collaborative environment is to promote interaction between these areas.     

The graduate program's curriculum, course prerequisites, and admission requirements have been designed to serve the needs of students with diverse backgrounds, particularly those with quantitative training in the physical, mathematical, and computer sciences. The program allows the enrollment of interdisciplinary students who do not fit naturally into any traditional graduate program but who show a strong interest and aptitude for interdisciplinary biology research.

The curriculum of the graduate program in computational biology and molecular biophysics involves three types of courses: background courses, core courses, and electives.

Background Courses. Students with a limited background in an area of interdisciplinary biomedical research may be required to take one or more specific undergraduate or first-year graduate courses. In general, these requirements will be decided by the graduate program director and the student's thesis adviser. The specific options for students with a limited background in biology and/or chemistry are outlined in the section "Requirements for the Ph.D. Degree.    

Core Courses. These are specifically designed interdisciplinary courses that survey particular areas of computational biology and molecular biophysics and are meant to transition students into research at the forefront of the field. These courses cover a broad range of topics, i.e., protein structure; biophysics of molecular assemblies; algorithms in bioinformatics; simulation techniques; biochemical and genetic networks; signaling, data mining, and pattern recognition; mathematical modeling and control theory.

Electives. Courses are taught by faculty members within traditional doctoral programs that expose students to the techniques and scientific standards of traditional disciplines, many of which form the basis of technical and computational developments in computational biology and molecular biophysics research. Students can select electives with the approval of their advisory committee from virtually all graduate courses offered by life science, mathematical and physical sciences, computer science, and engineering programs at Rutgers and UMDNJ including biochemistry, biomedical engineering, cell and developmental biology, chemical and biochemical engineering, chemistry and chemical biology, computer science, mathematics, mechanical and aerospace engineering, mechanics, microbiology and molecular genetics, cellular and molecular pharmacology, physics and astronomy, and statistics.

 
For additional information, contact RU-info at 732-445-info (4636) or colonel.henry@rutgers.edu.
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