Introduction to Quantitative Modeling in Biology
Course Code
BIOS 20151 91
Course Description
Although mathematics and biology have traditionally not gotten along, recent advances in molecular biology and medicine have made biological experiments essentially quantitative. This course introduces mathematical ideas that are useful for understanding and analyzing biological data, including data description and fitting, hypothesis testing and Bayesian thinking, Markov models, and differential equations. Students acquire hands-on experience working with data and implementing mathematical models computationally using the R programming language. The two main goals are to acquire computational skills and conceptual familiarity with mathematical models used in biological research.
Course Criteria
This course is required to partially fulfill the general education requirement in biology for Biological Sciences majors in all tracks, except for students taking BIOS 20152 and students in the Advanced Biology sequence.
This course cannot be used as a Topics course for the general education requirement for non-Biological Sciences majors.
Instructor(s)
Dmitry Kondrashov
UChicago Registration 1