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Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Programme

The Bioinformatics and Systems Biology programme is a joint degree programme from VU Amsterdam and the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Courses are taught at both universities, and VU and UvA jointly issue a degree to graduates. As a Bioinformatics and Systems Biology student in Amsterdam, you benefit from the expertise, networks, and research projects at both universities and affiliated research institutes.

Curriculum

The programme guarantees that, upon successful completion of the study, you can communicate effectively with your colleagues, irrespective of your focus on experimental or computational disciplines. You will get a basic introduction to molecular cell biology, biomathematics, biostatistics, and programming.

During the Master's programme, you can choose between two specialisations, Bioinformatics or Systems Biology, or choose both.

• Bioinformatics deals with large-scale data analysis, like DNA-sequencing experiments. Programming, algorithms, and machine learning are important elements. Bioinformatics is extensively used within the field of biomedicine, but also in many other areas of molecular biology.
• Systems Biology encompasses modelling large biological networks, in combination with experiments to probe the system. Mathematical modelling, structured large-scale experiments, and statistical analysis are important elements in the specialisation. Systems Biology is extensively used in bioengineering and biomedicine.

Specialisations

Bioinformatics

In the Bioinformatics specialisation track, you will follow three additional profile courses in which you will learn how to write algorithms that can align sequences, design complex bioinformatics workflows to process molecular profiling data, predict how protein folds given only their sequence, simulate protein molecules, and apply machine learning effectively on large-scale molecular profiling datasets in biomedicine.

These profile courses are compulsory for the Bioinformatics specialisation:

• Fundamentals of Bioinformatics
• Introduction to Systems Biology
• Statistics with R
• Biosystems Data Analysis
• Major Bioinformatics Research Project BSB
• Algorithms in Sequence Analysis
• Structural Bioinformatics
• Bioinformatics for Translational Medicine

Systems Biology

The Systems Biology specialisation track comprises three additional profile courses. In these courses, you will learn how to model large metabolic pathways, how to deal with large and heterogeneous experimental datasets, how to set up experiments to probe biological systems, and how experiment modelling and data analysis should be combined.

These profile courses are compulsory for the Systems Biology specialisation:

• Fundamentals of Bioinformatics
• Introduction to Systems Biology
• Biosystems Data Analysis
• Major Systems Biology Research Project BSB
• Basic Models of Biological Networks
• Systems Biology in Practice
• Statistics with R

Research Projects

In the final year of your Master, you will do one or two research projects.

• Research topics: Typical research topics include: Sequencing workflows, molecular profiling, molecular pathway analysis, drug sensitivity predictions, structural variant analysis, microbial evolution, biomarker discovery, sequence analysis algorithms, data science, tissue modelling, biophysical simulation, metabolic pathways, gene regulatory networks, modelling of signal transduction, stochastic modelling, and experimental projects with a strong quantitative approach or biochemical simulations.
• Institutes: You can conduct your research projects in hospitals (for example, in the fields of oncology and clinical genetics), at biotech companies, at seed breeding companies, in the pharmaceutical industry, in the food industry, in data science, and of course at bioinformatics and systems biology groups at universities.

Programme Outcomes

After completing the Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Master's programme, you will be skilled in scientific research. You will be able to think abstractly on a high level. Also, you will learn to deal with rapid and exciting scientific developments in these research areas.