MSc in Digital Biology

If you find that our distance learning courses suit you, you might decide to go beyond individual modules to work towards a formal qualification from the University of Manchester. You can use the information here to begin to build your own study plan. Of course, you can also ask for advice at any stage in your programme. The semester dates and the course fees are given on the Dates and fees page. The research project, which is an important part of the Masters qualification, can significantly enhance your career profile. On the projects page you will see some examples of the ways in which our graduates have used the research project in the development of a career in bioinformatics.

These are exciting times in biology and medicine. The genomics revolution is opening up whole new areas of research, allowing new insights into how cells and organisms function and new understandings of disease and disease processes. Biologists are capturing huge amounts of information for transcriptomics, proteomics and the metabolomics, while medicine is currently involved in the largest and most ambitious IT project in the world – the capture and interpretation of electronic patient records. This information will make health care much more effective by making it easier to spot new diseases early - whilst they can still be contained and controlled.

At the heart of these developments are data and knowledge – and a real need and demand for the skills and techniques that computational methods can bring these problem areas. Biology and healthcare now provide some of the fastest growing and most challenging areas in which biologists and computer scientists must work together to apply their skills.

Our courses in Digital Biology will help you to develop the core skills needed to work in these new areas. You may begin by taking individual unitss, and then decide whether to progress to complete a formal qualification by distance learning. Masters candidates take six modules, followed by a research project. For those people already active in biological research, a Postgraduate Certificate focussed on data analysis might be most appropriate.

Links to information on the individual units are provided below, together with guidance on the entry points to the programme. For more information on the Masters programme in Digital Biology, please contact the office for Advanced Professional Education.

Computing for Biologists		Computational Biology
Introduction to software development in Java		Bioinformatics for Systems Biology
Data Modelling and Databases		Mathematics for metabolic modelling
Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with UML		Computational systems biology
Cloud Computing		Introduction to Health Informatics
Designing for Parallelism		Advanced Sequence Analysis
Parallel Programs and their Performance		Bioinformatics for trancriptomics

Digital Biology entry points