Biological Sciences

This course explores the wonders of animal behavior and how the interaction between behavior and ecology has been shaped by natural selection. Students use examples of a wide range of behaviors, from simple innate responses to complex decision-making, while at the same time getting a comprehensive introduction to evolutionary thinking.

The unifying topic of this course is how genes and their interactions, either with other genes or with the environment, make us what we are. The course introduces students to the subject of human genetics, enable them to appreciate the implications of genetic research for society and provide a basis for more advanced studies. Students learn to understand and critically evaluate scientific studies in human genetics, whether reported in scientific journals or in the lay press.

This course is an introduction to developmental biology and genetics - in plants, animals and other relevant groups of organisms. It uses concepts and principles from genetics and epigenetics to focus on classical, experimental systems/organisms and connections. The context of the course is system-oriented genetics development in a genome perspective, and the essence is how genetics and epigenetics via specialization and interaction between cells form the foundation for development and morphological traits.

This course is an advanced biology course providing an understanding of the fate, uptake, and effects of anthropogenic pollutants in the environment. Students study and apply ecotoxicological theories, models, and common methods and approaches concerning the fate of pollutants in the environment using fugacity-based multimedia partitioning models, uptake and accumulation using models of bioconcentration and biomagnification, and effects on different levels of biological organization (cellular, organism, population, and ecosystem) using ecotoxicological test methods with different endpoints.

This course provides an integrated approach to modern genetics, which includes molecular genetics; genomics; information science; molecular evolution, and classical genetics. This course covers current genetics and a new viewpoints on the molecular basis of life.

This course covers genes studied in pathologies (such as cancer) at multiple levels: selector genes, regulatory genes, and cell type-specific genes. Topics include the developmental biological role, mutated phenotypes, related experiments, and the mechanism in cancer or the relevance to the study of cancer for each gene type.