Bioinformatics is an important interdisciplinary research area with tremendous opportunity in graduate training and industry employment. Beginning in Fall 2012, undergraduates in any UCLA Major can can obtain a Bioinformatics Minor. Since then, approximately 80 students have joined the minor program, representing majors in Computer Science; Chemistry; Molecular, Cell, & Developmental Biology; Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics; Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; and Computational and Systems Biology.
Scope and Objectives
The minor in Bioinformatics allows students to develop an integrated understanding of contemporary genomic-scale research. Through a comprehensive inventory of courses, the minor in Bioinformatics provides a solid foundation in, and familiarity with, active research problems at the interface of computer science, biology, and mathematics.
Students undertaking the Bioinformatics Minor explore the genetic determinants of complex human disease, including psychiatric diseases and cancer, the development of computational methods for the analysis of expression data and the epigenome, and the study of population genetics and evolution.
Through completing the Bioinformatics Minor, students will be able to:
- undertake advanced computer programming tasks
- understand issues fundamental to the inherent structure of biological information
- develop computational methods to analyze biological data
- engage in active research with a strong and growing group of faculty
- competitively apply to graduate programs in Bioinformatics
- competitively enter the biotechnology industry
Over 45 faculty specializing in computational and experimental biology are associated with the Bioinformatics Minor, spanning biology, mathematics, engineering, and medicine. With courses from over 12 departments, the minor encompasses the breadth of the growing bioinformatics field.
Minor Administration
The UCLA Bioinformatics Minor is hosted in the UCLA Department of Computer Science and chaired by Professor Eleazar Eskin. Advising is performed by HSSEAS Advisors and the Department of Computer Science.
Questions?
Contact a Bioinformatics undergraduate counselor via myUCLA Message Center. To make sure your message and request for a meeting reaches the appropriate counselor, please include the phrase “Bioinformatics Minor” in the subject line.
We are tracking student interest in and completion of the Bioinformatics Minor, as well as undergraduate research experiences in Bioinformatics at UCLA. To help guide further development of the Minor and undergraduate research opportunities in general, we ask that you take a few minutes to complete this survey: http://bit.ly/uclabioinformaticsminorsurvey