Biostatistics and Informatics - 2025

This undergraduate course introduces students to the foundational concepts and tools of bioinformatics and biostatistics, equipping them with skills to analyse and interpret biological data. With the growth of genomics, biomedical research, and computational biology, students will explore how biological data (e.g., DNA, RNA and Protein sequences) can be analyzed; as well as understanding statistical principles and methods. This course aims to equip students with the basic knowledge about different types of data, concept of probability, hypothesis testing, and how to analyze data. The major emphasis of the course is to be able to analyze data using the approaches being taught in the class.

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Understand and explain the core principles of biostatistics and bioinformatics relevant to biological research.
• Use bioinformatics databases and tools (e.g., NCBI, BLAST, Ensembl, UniProt) to access, retrieve, and analyse molecular biology data.
• Conduct basic computational analyses including sequence alignment, gene annotation, and clustering.
• Interpret and communicate the results of data analyses in a biological context, with appropriate visualizations and scientific reasoning.
• Apply statistical methods such as descriptive statistics, hypothesis testing, correlation, and regression to biological data.
• Assess suitability of statistical tests for underlying data distributions in biological data.