BIOL 313 - Computing For Biologists

Credit Hours: 4
Frequency of Offering: Offered in alternate years, usually in the fall semester

Biological data is getting more expansive with every passing year, making it necessary to develop new computational approaches to gather, sort, analyze, and visualize data. This course will survey a variety of computational approaches used in the analysis of biological data. Specifically designed for students with little-to-no experience writing computer code, this course will introduce students to working in a UNIX-like environment, to a variety of scripting languages (Python, R, bash), and to the creation and use of databases. This course will be laboratory intensive with many lecture periods being used as laboratory periods and will also survey recent primary literature that applies computational approaches to fundamental questions in ecology, genetics, and evolutionary biology.

Prerequisite(s): BIOL 270, or permission of instructor.