How fast is the latest variant of COVID-19 spreading? How fast was Ebola spreading in West Africa? Where did these epidemics come from? How can we construct the phylogenetic tree of great apes, and did gene flow occur between different apes? At the end of the course, students will have designed, performed, presented, and discussed their own phylodynamic data analysis to answer such questions.

The aim of the course is to provide up-to-date knowledge on how we can study biological processes using genetic sequencing data. Computational algorithms extracting biological information from genetic sequence data are discussed, and statistical tools to understand this information in detail are introduced.

Introduction to Programming provides an overview of the basic programming blocks needed to translate a problem, stated in textual form, into an algorithm that solves such problem. The course provides an introduction to the MATLAB programming language and covers Bash scripting and other programming languages such as R and Python.