Prospect and qualify for Life sciences

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[Music] hi welcome to this talk on the computational biology program which is of course necessitated by the corona virus outbreak here in Singapore and worldwide and I'm going to make that connection to that because it is really the case that this field computational biology is is central to how people are understanding the corona virus outbreak and how people will predict how people are predicting where this outbreak is going to go and and the uncertainty in the future over the coming months so what does camp bio computational biology is is a hybrid or an intersection between two seemingly disparate fields the field of biology which we often think of as being empirical qualitative we often see biology texts as pictures or drawings in a textbook and we think of computer science as being something entirely different something derived from logic and abstractions involving mathematics and in a digital world but in fact today and going forward computational biology is the direction that biology is headed and it's the place where biology already is in the next few years genomic data is going to be the largest single source of data in the entire world it'll be larger than astronomical data it'll be larger than all the video data on YouTube and Twitter any other source so what's happening is that in the field what we're doing is applying computational techniques algorithms new ideas of modeling and simulation into the field of biology and since 2004 and us has offered an undergraduate degree in this exciting and new field [Music] what's the program the program is part of the Faculty of science it's a multidisciplinary program it's a four-year program so this an honours it's a direct admission honors program and in the first two years students study as you'll see quite a lot of computer science and mathematics and statistics as well as a core component of life sciences and they start to branch into specializations beginning in the third year it's multidisciplinary it involves many departments it involves departments in the Faculty of science it involves departments in the School of Medicine it involves the School of Computing on the other end of campus and we have affiliated faculty members from the School of Engineering and from the center for computational biology at the Duquesne u.s. Medical School from when the students in the Faculty of science when they read those modules what they start is they start to develop a well-rounded appreciation and an understanding of the life sciences but in a way that's different from their life science major classmates they also study much more mathematics and much more statistics the laboratory of computational biology is the computer so if you think of somebody in the in the life sciences working in a laboratory maybe with a pipette or working out in the field with some collection devices our laboratory is sitting at the computer and doing experiments or simulations or data analysis at the computer so the students in our program don't have to take wet laboratory modules in the school of computing they learn how to program they learn not just how to program in practice but also about algorithms and data structures and various advanced topics they learn a lot of analytic skills from both the School of Computing and the Faculty of science by taking modules in statistics that overlap quite heavily with the majors in the data sciences and how do they manage all this well unlike say students majoring in computer science they are not required to develop the same level of software engineering skills that might be required if somebody who's full-time in the school of computing these two trade-offs of the wet laboratory and the software engineering allows students to read computational biology as an undergraduate major so what's the curriculum looked like well for the first couple of years students study biology and chemistry and most of their classes in these are with other are with students who are majoring in the life sciences along with computer science students they study programming methodology data structures algorithms and so on in year two they go further in biology molecular genetics cell biology bioinformatics and introductory computational biology and in mathematics they study calculus linear algebra discrete structures probability mathematical statistics which how they organize these modules of course depends on the individual students starting in year 3 students may study more specialized technique areas of interest so they may study protein structure and function mathematical methods underlying genomics genomic data analysis which is a very practical module and they might start to specialize in either a more computer science like direction that is databases Mich machine learning neural networks artificial intelligence life sciences so they might specialize in biophysics or genomics neurobiology we've had students specialize in all of these or the data sciences and applied statistics in year four students take on a full year research project or they can now take on a one semester full-time internship they also take some modules they take and advanced topics in bioinformatics which draws from the literature functional genomics which is a life sciences module an advanced life sciences module and they can take continued specialization modules such as the some of the things listed here depending on their specialization interests the final year research projects vary a lot these are just some examples so here's a this first project is a theoretical project that deals with epigenetics some of these are very applied projects here this is a great project from a students who's moved on to a PhD in how the original multicellular organisms came about and then this is a fun project here at the end about putting genes on Twitter 20,000 gene accounts on Twitter and allowing genes to tweet and interact with humans the project's vary widely and they're chosen by a student and a professor who supervises the project [Music] so that's a little bit about the program how do you get into this program the first thing is you have to get into the Faculty of science so students who apply to the Faculty of sidon science and get in and accept that admission are then eligible to apply to computational biology the application is on the Faculty of science website and there's more information at the end of this presentation about it it's a simple application and it's a niche program so we have an opportunity to review every student for what they what their needs are for the program students should have good a level H two passes or equivalent in mathematics or further mathematics and either biology or chemistry if they have not done H two in either biology or chemistry then they should have some au level or equivalent pass in it in which case it's possible to take a bridging module [Music] so those are the basic admissions of the program students are considered on an individual basis and we often have interviews so students this program has a reputation for being hard that's reasonable nobody comes to NUS expecting a cakewalk so you should be interested in something and I want to be clear about the challenges of the program it can be difficult because part of the difficulty is just balancing the education of computer science type classes and life sciences classes some of the classes are hard in they're hard in different ways module schedules may be difficult to arrange especially for students who are going between different faculties and in the first two years sometimes students get very deep into computer science and they don't see or it's hard to see how that relates to their life sciences education this is because the program initially tracks really closely with computer science and life science major requirements and so the classes tend to be filled with students of those majors nonetheless the program is extremely rewarding and the students have come out of this have gotten great things out of the program it's really unique it's powerful it allows students to go deeper in these areas than they would otherwise be able to do if you studied computer science alone you wouldn't really have the opportunity to understand and appreciate the problems that really occur in the life sciences if you study life sciences alone you generally don't get the rigorous training to put the mathematics and computer science to use if you consider what other options there are you could do a double major in computer science and life sciences with honors this is a very difficult road in my view working in the dry lab that is working on a computer is more is is in some respects more is preferable to working in the wet lab certainly if you drink coffee you can drink coffee in the lab in a way that you can't do in the wet lab the class is small the cohort is fairly small and you'll have an opportunity to know all of your classmates and get support from your seniors and finally we're here to help not just the faculty and the administrators but your seniors and a network of students interested in computational biology [Music] what we're looking for is students to graduate from this program with a really good interdisciplinary education and they will be prepared to succeed in this new biology area we expect them and we found that students are sought-after for job opportunities and postgraduate programs and they have a really wide range of career choices sometimes they are so in demand that they get hired outside of computational biology just because of that interdisciplinary background and rigor there's some really obvious career prospects for this major so students may major in the main go on directly into say the pharmaceutical industry biomedical industry biotechnology Health Sciences or going to graduate studies in one of these disciplines that's pretty obvious maybe less obvious is to be hired in as a data scientist in some industry that's not directly related to the more obvious choices and maybe less obvious still our careers in entirely different fields where the people who hire into those fields value the learning agility the ability to work in cross-disciplinary environments that this major develops so we've had students who have gone on to wildly different careers so we've had students who've gone on to do computer science PhDs or life sciences PhDs we've had students hired as data scientists first sometimes in the pharmaceutical industry and then elsewhere we've had students hired graduates hired as statisticians we've had a graduate who was initially hired as to look at biotech industry and eventually became an investment manager and the data sciences are not just it people who hired in data sciences in this major are not just hired in the life sciences but sometimes in areas that diverge off such as insurance our graduates do quite well and they're generally in demand for both postgraduate studies and for career opportunities with that I want to just leave it this is a QR code that you can use from your phone and we'll take you to more information on the computational biology program you can also get more information simply by emailing this email and this will go to our program administrators and myself and we can address any questions that you might have thanks for listening and putting yourself through this video hope to see you in class in the fall of 2020 [Music]