Bioinformatics

You develop the knowledge of bioinformatics and practical data analysis skills needed by employers and the economy.

The government has provided funding for this course, independent of any previous or current funding you may have for educational purposes. You can apply for short course funding if you are currently in education, or already qualified to degree, master's or PhD level. If you are funding this course with a student loan you also need to meet student loan eligibility criteria. Find out more about short course loans.

The course will provide you with essential information illustrating the breadth of health science provision within the delivery of high quality, person-centred care. Some of this information will be from personal experience of service users/carers utilised in delivery of the indicative content.

This course is ideal if you are:

• a school or further education college leaver wanting to explore a subject before committing to a full degree
• unemployed and wanting to develop skills to improve your employability
• a teacher looking to refresh your knowledge in a subject, or to learn new skills
• in work and your performance can be enhanced by learning new knowledge and skills
• returning to education after a break
• currently in higher education and would like to compliment your skillset with additional knowledge and skills.

You can only enrol on one short course at a time.

• Introduction to bioinformatics and genomics including analysis of genomic data.
• Sequence alignment and phylogeny.
• Data types, application methods and analysis.
• Reference genomes and databases.
• Using computational methods to test hypotheses.
• Major bioinformatics pipelines and analysis workflows.
• Practical analysis of biological data.

The course runs for 12 weeks, using a blended learning approach.

The course includes a one week block of on-campus teaching within the 12 teaching weeks. This block will include five days of six hours a day (9.00am - 12.00pm, 1.00pm - 4.00pm) delivered as a mixture of group work, seminars, and practicals or science labs. The remaining study is online.

You are assessed through a series of practical data exercises based upon the core computing practices used in the bioinformatics field.