Deconstructing Research Methods in Computational Biology

2 units · Undergraduate upper division (100-199)

Lecture, two hours. Students are exposed to research methodology and offered a peek behind the scenes of a typical computational research project. Open to students who are new to research or about to join a research laboratory. These students benefit from learning topics about research design, planning, and execution of a project and its culmination as a published research article. Study adopts a reductionist (as much as possible) approach, and focuses on some specific research questions and methods of addressing them. Faculty guests present a compilation of key research papers that tackles specific problems in their field. Students complete an in-depth analysis of the papers and formulate projects that mirror the research problems and solutions as described in the paper. Letter grading.