Intro to Programming

1 Credit · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

There is only one piece of scientific equipment that all biologists—cell biologists, evolutionary biologists, neurobiologists, physiologists, biochemists, immunologists, ecologists, developmental biologists, astrobiologists...seriously, all biologists—use in their research. Yet few of them are trained properly to use it to maximal effect: the computer. This course provides a brief introduction to computer programming with biological applications. It is aimed at students who have never dipped a toe in the programming waters. Students can expect to emerge from this course with the ability to write simple programs (e.g., simulations of population processes, scripts to process data and perform statistics) in one computer language and, more importantly, with an appreciation for computational thinking and the knowledge of basic computations performed in virtually all programming languages.