Skip to main content Skip to secondary navigation
Main content start

Courses

BIOE 219: Fundamentals of Regeneration Biology

This course is a guided tour into regeneration biology, with an emphasis on fundamental developmental processes. Instead of focusing on what we know, the goal of this course is for students to trace how we know, and how we should ask good questions for the future. In my opinion, the most important scientific problems are often left unresolved not for lack of adequate information, but for lack of insights to specify the questions that require explanation. Therefore, in this class, we work together to search for important questions in the area, by reconstructing historical and controversial ideas, dissecting classic literature, formulating our own questions, and debating to test our answers. Therefore, the class is expected to be interactive and even provocative, and the students should be willing to read beyond the class as active reading is essential to succeed in this course.

BIOE 269/BIO 269: Comparative Single-cell Genomics in the Ocean

The goal of the course is to provide students with hands-on experience in applying single-cell sequencing technology to examine marine animals with cellular resolution, both at the bench and on computers. Throughout the course, students learn how to collect animals, dissect and dissociate tissues, generate single-cell sequencing libraries, process and analyze their own data, and compare cell types across animals using the computational pipelines. This pipeline is optimized to study organisms without extensive prior knowledge and provides students with a valuable set of tools for future work in this field. This course uses a diverse set of animals in order to study the conservation and divergence of cell types and their gene regulatory programs across the animal kingdom. 

 

For students

Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, "To solve old problems, study new species". (video)

Uri Alon, "Why science demands a leap into the unknown". (video)

Martin Schwartz, "The importance of stupidity in scientific research". (read)

Eric Wieschaus, "Finding genes that control development". (video)

Elizabeth Gilbert, "Your elusive creative genius". (video)

Richard Hamming, "You and your research". (read)

Albert Einstein, "Principles of research". (read)