MPhil in Computational and Systems Biology

The aim of the course is to provide a thorough grounding, following undergraduate or graduate studies, for those students who wish to enter the fields of computational and systems biology and be able to work relatively independently on cutting-edge problems. The MPhil takes students from a variety of backgrounds and gives them a thorough grounding in the subject, from which they can go on to study for a PhD or find employment in industrial research. In this way, we help train the next generation of quantitative interdisciplinary researchers capable of applying systems approaches to many areas of biology and biotechnology. By the end of the course, students are expected to be familiar with a wide range of contexts that exploit computational approaches (e.g. next-generation sequencing, microarrays, proteomics, metabolomics, disease dynamics, neurophysiology, gene association studies) and draw on suitable methods for the analysis of data generated by these techniques. Modelling of biological systems forms a key objective of the course, from stochastic modelling of protein levels within a single cell to large-scale models of biological networks, population biology and infectious diseases.