White background with navy text that says, "Welcome! Chat with the Chair of Bioinformatics!" Below, a picture of someone working in a lab.
Alan Cheng speaks: And Tom just checking. You can hear me, too.
Thomas Screnci: Yep, I can hear you. Thank you very much.
So with that, I'm sure Al can hear me, too, which means all you can hear me, which is great. So with that, let's begin our session, our chat with the chair of Bioinformatics. As mentioned, please feel free to keep your cameras on or off throughout this presentation. But we do ask that you stay muted, just so there's no audio issues, and you can ask questions out the presentation through the chat feature, and there's have a Q&A at the end.
Screen changes to say "Moderators." Below, headshots and contact info Tom Screnci (tscrenci@brandeis.edu) and Jess Ronan (jronan@brandeis.edu).
Tom Screnci speaks: So I am Thomas Screnci. I'm the associate director of admissions and enrollment here at Brandeis Online. Jess Ronan is a colleague of mine who works in admissions team. We are the admissions members here at Brandeis Online. So you can reach us directly through email accounts listed here as well as our general inbox at the bottom of this screen. And you can always call us as well. Jess and I both checked that online@brandeis.edu email account. So however, you split it, you're reaching Jess and myself so feel free to reach out to us at any point.
Joining us is Alan Chang, the chair of the Bioinformatics program. I'm going to let Alan introduce himself, and then we'll continue with our breakdown of the bioinformatics program. Alan.
Powerpoint changes to say "Program Chair." There's a headshot of Alan Cheng, PhD, with bullet points below: Senior Director of Merck & Co, PhD University of California San Francisco, Past roles include: Principal Scientist at Amgen and Senior Scientist at Pfizer.
Alan Cheng speaks: Yep, Hi, everyone. So I'm the program chair for bioinformatics. I actually used to teach on campus at Brandeis for GPS, and then have been teaching online and then sharing the program online for the last few years.
My, I guess day, other role is senior director at Merck, where I lead a group of computational scientists. We work on early targets all the way to lead optimization, which is more chemistry. Yeah. So happy to meet you all.
Slide switches to say "Agenda." Bullet points say: Bioinformatics curriculum, Marketplace information, Admissions info, Open Q&A.
Tom Screnci speaks: Thank you, Alan. All right. So our agenda today, we're going to be covering the bioinformatics curriculum and the master's certificates. The related master certificates as well, talking about the industry and marketplace information, and wrapping up by talking about admissions, information before we turn it over to you all to you folks to ask any questions you may have about any aspects of Brandeis Online.
So with that. Let's jump back in. So as we begin our introduction to Brandeis, I mean, excuse me, the Bioinformatics program at Brandeis Online. I'll turn it back over to Alan to start to discuss the defining features and curriculum.
Slide switches to say "Program Defining Features." Four defining features are listed: Statistical and computational methods; Communication of bioinformatics analyses; Biological data analyses; Modeling biological processes to provide new insights.
Alan Cheng speaks: Yep, so you can see it laid out here, and I'll start at the top left corner, which is statistical and computational methods. And this is probably what you think of when you think of bioinformatics and bioinformatics, master's degrees or certificate programs. And that is a big piece of what we teach in bioinformatics techniques for analyzing sequence, data, genome data and structural data as well as well as going to the bottom left understanding what all that data means. And you know, you can generate information from the data and then interpreting that data is going to be super important. So understanding both the biological background and how to interpret your results allows you to then move to the bottom right, provide new insights into biological processes, and you can do all that and maybe have some impact. But you'll have the most impact if you're able to communicate your bioinformatics analyses with other team members and folks that you work with.
Bioinformatics is really interdisciplinary kind of domain, and often it's a team of people, and you might be the expert on some of these methods and analyses, but working with biologists, working with the data collectors, working with decision makers, the communication part is pretty important. So we practice that throughout our courses as well. I'll pass it over back to Tom.
Slide switches to say "Required Courses" and "Elective Courses." Required courses include: RBIF 100 — Bioinformatics Scripting and Databases with Python; RBIF 102: Molecular Biology, Genetics, and Disease; RBIF 109: Biological Sequence Analysis; RBIF 111: Biomedical Statistics with R; RBIF 112: Mathematical Modeling for Bioinformatics; and RBIF 114: Molecular Profiling and Biomarker Discovery. Elective courses include RBIF 101: Structural Bioinformatics; RBIF 106: Drug Discovery and Development; RBIF 108: Computational Systems Biology; RBIF 110: Cheminformatics; RBIF 115: Statistical Genetics; RBIF 120: Research Topics in Computational Biology; RBIF 290: Special Topics in Bioinformatics.
Tom Screnci speaks: Absolutely. So here you see our required curriculum and elective courses. Part of this curriculum, the elective. The program is a total of 10 courses. So you have the required courses here, and you're allowed to pick any elective courses to fulfill those requirements. And would you like to discuss anything further about this curriculum?
Alan Cheng speaks: Yeah, you'll see, the elective courses are pretty diverse. So it's kind of whatever you're interested in. So if you're interested in more drug discovery. If you're more interested in camera formats, human genetics like statistical genetics. The one I'll actually particularly point out is RBIF 120. That is an optional, elective course, but it allows you to do independent research with a mentor, with a faculty mentor. So you pick a topic of interest. And you kind of synthesize all the different skills you've picked up over the program to apply it to your topic of interest. So it's usually taken close to the last session of your graduate career.
And I think we'll go into RBIF 101 and 102 in a little bit.
Tom Screnci speaks: Right.
Slide changes to display the curriculum for three master's certificates: Cheminformatics, Drug Discovery Informatics, and Genomics.
Tom Screnci speaks: So Brandeis Online is also happy to offer these 3 master's certificate programs. As you can see, they're all 4 courses and share a lot of the same curriculum, all the same curriculum as the Master's degree, just in different formats. What is very enticing about these programs, a big opportunity is that all of Brandeis online's master's certificates are stackable or transferable into the degree. So if you started with, let's say, the chem informatics certificate program and later on decided you wanted to get the degree, you would have completed these 4 courses, and only have 6 more courses remaining to complete the degree, as all these 12 credits would transfer in. So it's an amazing pathway into the degree you can kind of work in bits and pieces, in a manner of speaking, as you progress through the program and have all your credits transferable. So definitely a wonderful opportunity for those who are maybe just thinking of a certificate, don't think they need a degree or don't want one at the time, and you're able to kind of hold those credits and have them progress towards a degree later on. So definitely a wonderful opportunity for you if you're thinking of a certificate.
So now turn it back over to Al once again to to dive us a little deeper into RBIF 100.
Slide switches to say "Required Course." Heading says RBIF 100: "Bioinformatics Scripting and Databases with Python." Bullet points below say: "A high-content introduction to scripting and programming with applications in bioinformatics. Appropriate for students with little previous programming experience. Course covers fundamentals of working with Linux systems, using bioinformatics tools, and manipulating biological data files. The focus will be on scripting with Bash and Python."
Alan Cheng speaks: Yeah. So we'll talk about 100, 102, which are usually the 2 courses that almost all students take at the beginning of their bioinformatics kind of journey here.
So RBIF 100 is bioinformatics scripting databases with python. It's really you don't need background in coding, although some introduction is helpful, and I'll discuss that in a minute. But it basically introduces you to scripting coding with python and applications to bioinformatics. And it's a great way to get into bioinformatics. This course is is designed specifically for bioinformatics students, and, like all of our courses, all of our courses are designed specifically for bioinformatics students to give you kind of the most bang, I guess, bang for your buck. It's very focused on you. It's not teaching you other topics. It's not a course that was picked out for another program that we're repurposing.
So you can see a little bit more details. So what we have seen. You don't need to come in with any python or any coding experience. What we do provide is some tutorials before the session, and we highly encourage those that have no experience at all to take those tutorials they're offered for free. Brandeis offers it through the library, or there's online resources as well. And so we highly encourage that to make it easier for you to go through RBIF 100, it's just different for different people. And we found that that really helps. So we provide that as well.
And then the next one is RBIF 102.
Slide switches to say "RBIF 102: Molecular Biology, Genetics, and Disease." Below, bullet points say:" Covers concepts of classic genetics; sequencing and mapping technologies using Human Genome Project; Basic sequence analysis methods and techniques; Cloning and methods for genetic manipulation are introduced."
Alan Cheng speaks: And so that's the others kind of the other side of the coin, which is the biology understanding the biology and biology implications of bioinformatics. And this course is also designed specifically for our bioinformatics program and bioinformatics students. And so we cover a lot of genetics. We cover genome sequencing, biology interpretation, a lot of newer methods such as Crispr.
But because it's crafted specifically for our program, we also include our coding in that. So it's kind of like a gentle introduction to our coding using data sets that are relevant to to molecular biology and genetics. So that's RBIF 102.
Thomas Screnci: Yes, thank you, Alan. We're going to transition away from our discussion of the curriculum and start to move into the industry insights. So hand it back over to Alan to talk about our marketplace industry before we start to move towards admissions.
Alan Cheng: Yeah, sure.
Slide switches to say "Marketplace Information." Bullet points say: "Bioinformatics market estimated to grow from USD 2.5 billion in 2021 to USD 5.3 billion by 2026. A compound annual growth rate of 13.7% from 2023 to 2030."
Alan Cheng speaks: Yeah, so bioinformatics is growing. You know, it's leveraging data that we can collect. And increasingly, we can be more precise in the medicines. We develop the diagnostics and the way we apply medicines by leveraging genome sequencing or Snp sequencing. And it's not just true of human health. It's also true of ecology, of agriculture and other areas as well. And we've definitely had students, even students that basically, do you know, animal health? So maybe work at the zoo, or actually work in animal health. And so the the overall market is growing, and it will. It continues to grow. And there's a bunch of numbers here.
You'll see that, you know, there's a bunch of hotbeds of biopharma, which is a lot of our students, but not all of our students. There's a hotbed of biopharma in Massachusetts, in California, and those are growing. And these bio kind of biotech hotbeds are kind of popping up throughout the country. And then there's also biomanufacturing, and you can see they're concentrated in a few areas as well, and those have been growing as well.
Slide switches to say "Bioinformatics Faculty." Bullet points list occupations of Brandeis Online faculty: Bioinformatics Engineer IV at Memorial Sloan Kettering Center, Research Fellow at Pfizer, VP of Translational Genomics at Maze Therapeutics and more.
Alan Cheng: And I can jump into the faculty at. But yeah, at Brandeis you can see that our faculty come from a lot of different backgrounds, and I'll group them kind of into 3, and we purposely do hire from different backgrounds.
So one is kind of biopharma, large biopharma. And so we have instructors from Pfizer from Gilead Boringer, so kind of the novartis. So some of the large biopharma. Then we also have our second kind of group are smaller biotechs, such as may therapeutics, Meta Therapeutics, Regenta, and others. And then we have some instructors from academic kind of centers, research centers such as Memorial, Sloan, Kettering, John Hopkins, and other places as well.
So we try to have a balance. We think that's an excellent way for students to learn more about the opportunities that are out there through interacting with faculty from these backgrounds. And there's opportunities to ask, you know, throughout your course.
Usually the courses have a kind of open Q&A section so weekly. There's a Q&A section. But there's an open Q&A section where you can just ask in general about careers about the industry. You can talk to other students. It's kind of like a water cooler type area. So that's a great place to learn more as well.
Thomas Screnci: Thank you, Alan. I'll also add that all of our programs here at Brandeis Online have professional Advisory Board members as well, who will help us in terms of the growth direction changes to our program, and with student advisement mentoring any type of student support, possibly, as well. So they are a great asset of our programs development and with student support. So there's another factor of the of the professional staff. You could say to all Brandeis Online programs.
Slide switches to say "Bioinformatics Requirements." Bullet points say: "Molecular Biology or Biochemistry; Statistics, Probability, or Biostatistics. We can recommend courses to take if you do not meet prerequisites. NO previous coding experience required."
Tom Screnci speaks: When it comes to applying to the program to whether it be the degree or certificate programs we are looking for students who have molecular biology or biochemistry experience, as well as stat probability or biostatistics experience.
We're just looking for one from each of these 2 bullet points, not looking for all 5 of them. Just, you know, one of each is all we're looking for. To satisfy this requirement no coding experience is required. It is helpful to have that it definitely will help you as you jump into the program, so we will oftentimes recommend courses like Python for everybody, and Coursera to get people, you know, more familiar, or buff up their their skills, so to speak, in Python. It's not required, but it is certainly helpful, if you are looking for for that.
Slide switches to list Application Checklist: 1. Online application, 2. Official transcripts, 3. Resume, 4. Statement of Goals, 5. Letter of Recommendation. No application fee and no GRE/GMAT required.
Tom Screnci speaks: So when it comes to admissions, the the 1st aspect I'm going to cover is the degree application for our students, the certificate and the degree are separate applications. So this is just applicable to the degree. 1st and foremost, there is no application, fee, or standardized testing requirements for these programs.
We require the online application which is available through our website, Brandeis Online.
We are also looking for official transcripts from all of your previous institutions. This is as they relate to your bachelor's degree. So if you have a master's or even a doctorate, while it's not required for you to send those transcripts you are more than welcome to. To give us as much context to you as an academic learner, particularly if you have it on your resume which is required as well. If you have other degrees besides your bachelor's listed. It is wonderful to have those transcripts as well. So Alan and myself can review those as we review applications.
The statement of goals is your opportunity to just really communicate why you're applying to this program what you're hoping to get out of it, maybe. Why you chose Brandeis over a different school, or what about our program interests you. Some students will discuss career changes, developments in their education, maybe gaps or struggle, or times they struggled in their education as well. So it's your platform to just discuss anything you want. Give us context of you as an individual, but primarily to just explain why you're applying to this program. That's the main point of the statement of goals. It is requested to be 500 words or more, so it can be 500 words exactly. It can be 3 pages long if that's what you feel you want to to provide. To give us full context. Truly up to you. But 500 words or more is is the minimum.
Lastly, there's 1 letter of recommendation required as well, it is preferred to be from a current or former manager supervisor, something like that. So that is ideal. If you are on the younger side, maybe you're fresh out of undergraduate, fresh out of getting your bachelor's degree. Some students have certainly used people who have overseen a research project internships, managers, supervisors of unrelated positions and student positions possibly are acceptable. But at the end of the day someone who knows you in a professional capacity is a good reference with manager supervisor being the ideal candidate. You're welcome to send 2, 3, or more recommendations, but one is totally fine. It meets the meets the requirement.
That's the full list. As you can see, it can be completed in a week's time, and with no application, fee or standardized testing. That makes it very simple. If you earned your bachelor's degree outside of the United States, we do require an ECE or a WES version of your transcript, or report of your transcript. Please feel free to email us if you have questions on what that is or how to do that I'm happy to help.
There can be foreign language requirements in terms of English language testing. There are exceptions to that, quite a few of them. So if you're coming from outside the United States that's always important to know as well. So there's those 2 kind of notes to give for those who may be from international applicants. We do get a fair bit of students for Brandeis Online who are coming to us from international locations.
Slide switches to say "Master's Certificate Checklist." List includes: 1. Master's Certificate Enrollment form, tell us where you work, where you completed your bachelor's degree, current resume. 2. Pay the $500 non-refundable deposit.
Tom Screnci speaks: When it comes to the certificate it is very straightforward. You would complete our enrollment form on our website, which includes telling us about your work, your previous experience, bachelor's degree and uploading a resume, and from there it is complete and reviewed. If you're offered admission to the program, you would pay the $500 enrollment deposit, and then from there we connect you to your advisor, and you'd be able to begin your classes.
As mentioned earlier, the certificate is a wonderful pathway into the degree. If you complete the certificate and then decide to move on to a degree, you will have to submit all the application requirements. You don't get to kind of skip them because you did the certificate. We do waive the statement of goals, but if you do complete a certificate, we will at that point require the application, official transcripts, resume, and recommendations. So please note that these will be required of you if you complete the certificate and decide to move forward onto the degree.
We also offer, which I don't think is listed here, but we also offer the ability to enroll in a single course or up to 2 courses as a non-degree student. So if you're not in a certificate, not in a degree program, you can take up to 2 courses without being in any specific program just to test out Brandeis Online programs, try out our learning platform, that's up to you.
If you completed 2 courses in bioinformatics as a non-enrolled student, you can have those credits applied to the certificate, so you won't lose your your time. But it is a great way to try out Brandeis Online or online learning, if this would be your 1st experience in an online classroom.
Slide switches to say "Thank you for attending!" with pictures of graduates in caps and gowns.
Tom Screnci speaks: And that wraps up what we typically like to to cover in terms of the introduction into the Brandeis Online bioinformatics program, the application process as well. I'm happy to discuss the general experience procedures, processes for Brandeis Online students. I'm sure Alan will be happy to answer any specific questions you may have about the bioinformatics program, experience things like that.