Projects

Overview

The MSc project provides students with an opportunity to undertake original research in bioinformatics. A wide variety of projects are offered each year in such diverse areas as microarray analysis, structure prediction, mining biomedical texts and genome analysis.

Every project is expected to contain a computational component such as designing a database, creating a web server, or writing programs to analyse data — see the project guidelines for more information.

Projects are offered by members of staff within the School and by a range of external supervisors from other academic institutions (e.g. the National Institute for Medical Research, the European Bioinformatics Institute), or from industry (we had projects submitted by Pfizer, Unilever and Illumina in recent years). Sometimes students suggest projects of their own that we are able support.

Projects are chosen late in the Spring Term and become the primary focus for students after the exams (beginning of the Summer Term). Part-timers have to choose their project in their first year, so they are strongly advised to do some research into the scientific interests of members of staff during the Autumn and Spring terms (as they are not exposed to all the course material until their second year). Project are submitted in late August (in the second year for part-timers). The hand-in deadline for the current academic year will be confirmed in due course.

Assessment

The project report is assessed using the following criteria:

General presentation
Content
Understanding of the problem
Review of previous work, literature and theory
Presentation of data and results
Analysis, discussion and conclusions

The practical performance of students (when working on their projects) is assessed using the following criteria:

Motivation and effort
Initiative
Technical ability
Degree of supervision required.

Note: The hand-in date for projects will be strictly enforced. Extensions will only be granted under exceptional circumstances (e.g. if you are ill and have a certificate from your doctor). If you hand your project in after the deadline and have not been granted an extension in writing by the Course Director, your project mark will be capped at 50%.