Individual Major

Rationale

The individual major in Bioinformatics integrates courses from the following departments:

• Biology
• Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science
• History
• Philosophy
• Sociology and Anthropology

When dealing with large scale biological data, there are numerous ethical concerns. Privacy and disclosure are especially important issues when considering the rise in genomic testing. Additionally, any medical researcher must be fluent in communicating their results clearly to people of all backgrounds.

Central Questions

• What biological questions can be answered with computational methods?
• How can computational tools be used to analyze and interpret biological data?
• What are the ethical considerations in the use of bioinformatics in science and medicine?
• How can bioinformaticians responsibly and accurately communicate findings?
• What careers are a bioinformatics major responsible for?