Projects

The Masters 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.

Projects are offered by members of staff within the Department of Biological Sciences 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.

MSc 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.