Syllabus

Readings and assignments should be completed before each class session. Assignments, and instructions for submitting assignments, can be found at at the Assignments page.

Date Number Topic Reading Video Slides+ Assignment Solutions
Part I Data Science
Sept 7 L0 Introduction and orientation
Sept 9 L1 Information technology for managing science
Sept 9 -- Assignment 1 start
Sept 14 L2 Modern computing paradigms and RStudio Cloud
Sept 16 L3 Visualizing breast cancer transcriptomes
Sept 21 L4 Representing & manipulating data
Sept 23 L5 Transformations of breast cancer transcriptomes
Sept 27 -- Assignment 1 due
Sept 28 L6 Exploratory data analysis of breast cancer transcriptomes
Sept 28 -- Assignment 2 start
Part II Bioinformatics
Sept 30 L7 The NCBI: a rich resource for the life sciences
Oct 5 L8 How to wrangle with marine microbes
Oct 7 L9 Organzing the Tara Ocean’s data
Oct 12 L10 Exploring microbial diversity across our oceans
Oct 14 L11 Representing genomes in R
Oct 19 L12 Genome annotations
Part III Computational Biology
Oct 21 L13 Transcription factor binding sites in Baker’s yeast
Oct 22 -- Assignment 2 due
Oct 26 -- Midterm (1.15 hr, open book)
Oct 28 L14 Gene finding with Hidden Markov Models
Oct 28 -- Assignment 3 start
Nov 2 L15 Gene finding continued
Nov 4 -- Project outline due for genomics diploma and grad students (1 page)
Nov 4 L16 Models of sequence evolution
Nov 9 L17 Phylogenies and alignments
Nov 11 L18 Basics of machine learning
Nov 13 -- Assignment 3 due
Nov 15 -- Assignment 4 start
Nov 16 L19 Discovery breast cancer subtypes: unsupervised analysis
Nov 18 L20 Transcriptomics: a deep dive
Nov 23 L21 Predicting breast cancer patient outcome from expression data: supervised analysis
Nov 25 L22 Deep learning CNNs: proliferative index of a cancer cell with microscopy
Nov 30 L23 Computational challenges of single cell profiling I
Part IV Reproducible Science and Communication
Dec 2 L24 Reproducibility in life science research
Dec 2 -- Assignment 4 due
Dec 10 -- Project due
Dec 15, 2pm-4pm -- Final (HB 130 (our normal classroom), open book)