Bioinformatics

The programme:

Bioinformatics is a discipline focusing on the development and application of theoretical models and computational methods for analyzing biological and biomedical data. It draws upon and combines many disciplines of natural science, e.g. molecular biology, genetics, mathematics, statistics, chemistry, and computer science.

Bioinformatics covers e.g. the following theoretical areas:

algorithmic development - with focus on string, pattern recognition and optimization algorithms and algorithm engineering for biological data sets,
software development - with focus on building tools and services,
statistical modeling - with focus on formal stochastic models, hidden Markov models, stochastic context-free grammars

and the following application areas

Evolutionary genome analysis
Structural bioinformatics
Medical bioinformatics
Association mapping
Networks and systems biology
Next generation sequence analysis

Affiliated centres/departments:

The research activities in bioinformatics at Aarhus University take place at the Bioinformatics Research Centre (BiRC) (www.birc.au.dk), which presently has about 50 researchers. Many projects are in close collaboration with the Departments of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Bioscience, Computer Science and Mathematics at the Faculty of Science and Technology and several Departments at Health Science, all in close proximity at Aarhus University campus. There are also several projects carried out in close collaborations with industry.

Examples of employment after graduation:

After graduation many students are employed in biotech and IT industries (for example QIAGEN) and many pursue research careers in Denmark and abroad at public institutions.