This course enrolls students who intend to pursue careers in medicine, dental medicine and/or medical research (either academic or industrial) as well as Bioinformatics graduate students. After commencing briefly with general introductory material (published reviews and other relevant background information), we proceed to examine, discuss and evaluate recent papers that directly illustrate the use of bioinformatics either in pre- clinical or clinical research settings. Papers will be drawn from high- impact journals such as Nature, Science, PNAS, Cell, and Science Translational Medicine. Students take turns presenting the papers to the class and provide brief critical reviews of each, both orally and in writing. They will also complete a term paper in the form of a research proposal directed to the goal of using bioinformatics to advance a medical intervention -- prognostic, diagnostic or therapeutic. Brief guest presentations by researchers working in BUSM (or BU Main Campus) laboratories will be arranged as appropriate. Previous guest facilitators have included faculty from the Department of Biostatistics, the Section of Computational Biomedicine, and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics as well as leading industrial research laboratories.

Note that this information may change at any time. Please visit the MyBU Student Portal for the most up-to-date course information.