Undergraduate Program

Courses for Nonmajors

BME 5, Introduction to Biotechnology, presents a broad overview of the impact of biotechnology on the diagnosis and treatment of disease.

BME 18, Scientific Principles of Life, covers the principles of life as it exists on this planet and how they generalize. Discusses Darwinian evolution, genomes, scientific theories of life (mechanistic, thermodynamic, information theoretic), and future of life (Internet, machine learning and adaptation, artificial intelligence, genome editing, fully artificial life).

BME 80G, Bioethics in the Twenty-First Century: Science, Business, and Society, is particularly appropriate to all students interested in the societal issues surrounding the revolutions in bioinformatics and biotechnology.

BME 80H, The Human Genome, covers principles of human inheritance and techniques used in gene analysis and discusses the evolutionary, social, ethical, and legal issues associated with knowledge of the human genome.

BME 110, Computational Biology Tools, provides an introduction to the tools and techniques of bioinformatics from a user's view. It is intended for biologists and biochemists who need to use bioinformatics tools, but are not primarily interested in building new bioinformatics tools.

BME 130, Genomes, teaches the principles of genome-scale analysis to answer biological questions.

BME 160, Programming for Biologists and Biochemists, provides an introductory programming class using Python to analyze, transform, and publish biological data.

BME 163, Applied Visualization and Analysis of Scientific Data, extends this life-science data focus with an emphasis on understanding and presenting that data.