Courses

Marine Invertebrates

BI 546 – taught during fall of even years

This 4-credit hour graduate-level course combines lectures, lab work, and field trips and projects exploring the diversity of marine invertebrates. Invertebrate diversity, morphology and anatomy are discussed against the backdrop of recent phylogenetic classifications of animal diversity. Taking this approach, students develop an understanding of how and when traits evolved in the history of life. Lectures touch upon previous classification schemes and the morphological and developmental characters that defined traditional classifications to convey that invertebrate biology and systematics remain evolving fields of inquiry. Student-led presentations and projects explore select topics of invertebrate biology and ecology in depth.

Bioinformatics & Phylogenetics

BI 694 – taught during fall of odd years

Bioinformatics & Phylogenetics is a 3-credit hour graduate course taught as a combined lecture and lab course. The goal of this course is to enable graduate students to pursue their independent thesis research using genomics and phylogenetics. The course covers the breadth of bioinformatics methods for sequence data analysis, ranging from genome and transcriptome assemblies to sequence similarity searches and short read mapping, differential gene expression, multiple sequence alignments, and phylogenetic analyses. Lectures discuss the theoretical underpinnings of bioinformatic analyses and the algorithmic approaches to sequence data analysis. Example data-sets are analyzed and in the process of these analyses, students learn the basics of navigating and programming the Linux shell, Python scripting, and working remotely on computer servers. Previous course material is available on GitHub.