Imm206a -- Systems Immunology

Course goals

Immunology 206 is a 3-unit introductory course reviewing the major underpinnings of systems immunology, including development of computational approaches to immunological questions.

The main deliverable for this class will be a systems immunology project detailing some specific question or problem in systems immunology that the students would like to investigate, how best to go about this investigation, and why it would be a worthwhile endeavor. The project will include computational analysis on some data - ideally real data. Progress will be assessed at two milestones during the quarter. This final project will also include a 15-minute presentation of the proposal. Small homework coding assignments, where each student will receive a related but unique task, will build a toolkit of functionality that all students can draw from over the course of the quarter.

By the end of the quarter, students should be familiar with the cutting edge palette of computational biology methods, and have developed applied expertise in at least one of them as you complete your course project. We find that we learn best when our efforts are applied to something we care about. To this end, the course is very project oriented, using real data. If you have appropriate data from your thesis work, you are encouraged to bring it: this course can act as an applied accelerator for the research you are already doing. If you do not have any appropriate data yet, do not worry: we will be introducing you to all of the major silos of immunological Big Data, and even potentially partner you up with a current expert in that analysis specialty for one-on-one additional guidance.

Contact information