Welcome Message
I am delighted to present to you the 6th issue of our HKUMed School of Biomedical Sciences newsletter. It has been almost one year since the inauguration of this newsletter, and it is playing an important part in keeping our staff, students and friends up to date with the happenings in the School. Wrapping up the year of 2021 and looking ahead to 2022, we are excited to introduce the BSc in Bioinformatics programme, the newest undergraduate programme offered by our School. The feature stories of the innovative research at Health@InnoHK and our students’ achievements in the 7th China International College Students‘ “Internet+” Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition will most certainly inspire everyone to be more creative and to think more about translating biomedical research. In addition, from this edition onwards, we will be going into the laboratories of our PIs to have a glimpse of their research work and what life is like to work in their research laboratories, starting with Drs. Clive Chung and Mu He’s laboratories.
Last but not least, I would like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Dr. Masayo Kotaka Member, Knowledge Exchange & Global Committee School of Biomedical Sciences
Teaching and Learning Introducing HKUMed new programme Bachelor of Science in Bioinformatics Feature Story
Bioinformaticians are biomedical scientists with strong quantitative skills who can harness the power of big data and novel digital health technologies to solve biomedical problems. With the establishment of The Hong Kong Genome Project and numerous new R&D centres created by the InnoHK initiative, there is now a strong and growing demand for bioinformaticians across the healthcare and biotechnology sectors. As such, there are now ample career opportunities for well-trained bioinformaticians locally and internationally. In response to this growing trend, our School will re-launch the Bachelor Science in Bioinformatics programme (BSc[Bioinformatics]) with the first intake commencing in the 2022/23 academic year. The expected intake size is 15 students. This modernised 4-year programme mirrors the flexible curriculum structure of BBiomedSc, which enables students to pursue a wide range of disciplinary courses and elective courses, with a broad range of opportunities for overseas exchange and internships. The programme has several innovative elements. Centrally, we have three compulsory ‘anchoring’ courses that serve as the backbone to enable multidisciplinary integration of diverse courses at each year level. These courses will use a problem-based learning approach to allow students to learn how to identify computational solutions to
real-world biomedical problems. The small class size of our programme will enable learning to be tailored to individual interests. In addition, we will design two new ‘data science laboratory’ courses, which are the ‘dry-lab’ equivalence of the experimental laboratory courses in the BBiomedSc programme. The capstone 12-credit final year project will allow students to complete a research dissertation with a bioinformatics academic supervisor across the Faculties of Medicine, Science and Engineering. In addition to the Bioinformatics major, we are also launching two related minors: Biomedical Data Science, and Digital Health. These 36-credit minors are open to all HKU undergraduate students, including BSc (Bioinformatics), BBiomedSc and BEng students. The minor in Biomedical Data Science allows students to gain data science skills to analyse genomics and other omic data for biomedical applications. The minor in Digital Health is designed for students who want to develop artificial intelligence and big data technologies for healthcare applications such as mobile health, medical AI analysis, and global health informatics.
E-prospectus
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