Biological Sciences

The course examines the development, causation, function, and evolutionary history of vertebrate and invertebrate behavior. 

This course introduces undergraduate students to a generalist view of the past terrain of life sciences. It covers a generalist view of the Greek origin of life sciences stretching all the way back to Aristotle and Galen. It also looks at a specialist analysis of biological problems involving physiology, cytology, microbiology, genetics, and molecular biology. 

The course is designed to prepare students for leadership in a globally interdependent and culturally diverse workforce. Throughout the course, students are challenged to question, think, and respond thoughtfully to the issues they observe and encounter in the internship setting, and the designated city in general. Students have the opportunity to cultivate the leadership skills of problem-solving, deliberation, negotiation, teamwork, intercultural communication, and systems thinking. In addition, the virtual nature of the course, with classmates attending from different regions of the world, offers a unique opportunity for cross-cultural comparative analysis. This is a hybrid course, with both online and in-person components. Online components include instructor led webinars, video lectures, discussion forums, assignments, and readings. Face-to-face elements of the course include local events, site visits, workshops, guest speakers, and participation in a prearranged internship, where students are required to work approximately 200-240 internship hours over the 8-week term.

This course systematically introduces the learning and memory, helping students understand research methods in neuroscience, the process of learning, the memory formation, the role of different brain regions involved in learning and memory, changes in brain structure and functional connections during learning and memory, the cellular and molecular basis of learning and memory, and brain diseases that affect learning and memory. We will discuss the recent scientific progress of neurobiology related with learning and memory, study the literature to explain the background, purpose, process, results, discussion, reference, in order to help students to understand the neuroscience research, help students improve their ability to perform independently experimental designing, literature exploring and logical thinking, and motivate students' interest in neuroscience.

This course demonstrates the dynamic earth, and how ideas from marine magnetics were utilized to revolutionize our understanding of the structure and dynamics of the Earth’s outer surface. Later, it explains fundamentals of marine magnetic anomalies, including measurements and modelling, and how it is used to explore fine-scale structures of oceanic crust. The second part of this course deals with marine sediments and marine environmental change. Firstly, the physical and chemical properties of marine sediments are presented, followed by illustrations of complex physical, chemical and biogeochemical processes in marine sedimentary environments. Later, it presents the establishment of geomagnetic polarity timescales, and principles and applications of magnetic stratigraphy and environmental magnetism for quantitatively reconstructing environmental and climatic changes. Development of various stages of the exciting international ocean drilling programs will be briefly presented. 

This course examines entomology including insect evolution, ecology, anatomy and physiology. 

This course examines the diversity in land plants from both phylogenetic and functional trait perspectives, exploring key steps in the evolution of plants and how they interact with their environment. It provides a framework of plant life focusing on the ecologically, economically and culturally important plants of Aotearoa New Zealand.

This course provides an introduction to the principles and concepts of behavioral ecology, and to the application of these to case studies in conservation biology in New Zealand.

This course examines the wide range of structures, functions and interactions of proteins and their importance in biological processes, biomedicine and biotechnology. Emphasis will be on the three-dimensional structure of proteins and their interactions with biological molecules. We will describe experimental and computational techniques and how they help in determining and predicting protein structure and function and aid in the development of new drugs. The subject matter addresses the general properties of protein structure; the major classes and topologies of proteins; evolution of sequence, structure and function; protein synthesis, folding, misfolding, targeting and trafficking; bioinformatics analysis of protein sequence and structure; binding of small molecules to proteins and drug design; protein-protein interactions; effects of mutations on tertiary structure, protein stability and biological functions; enzyme reaction kinetics and mechanisms; motor proteins; transporters.

Chemical ecology is the study of how chemicals, called semiochemicals, mediate interactions within and between species. Such interactions are very diverse, including, within species, mating, intraspecific competition, social status and foraging and, between species, predation and parasitism, defense and mutualisms such as pollination. This course examines how the different semiochemicals originate and how they are used and detected by organisms. Examine how chemists and biologists study these interactions and how some of these interactions can be used to assist humans, by manipulating organisms in the nature. Students are encouraged to develop their own interests, and the course is not limited to one particular organismic group. Both biologists and chemists are encouraged to join the course. Pre-requisites include BIO2001 Cell Biology and CHE2001 Organic Chemistry.