This course is the upper-division requirement for BMB majors and focuses on further development of communication skills you will need regardless of your career path after graduation. To be an effective scientific communicator, you need to continue to hone your skills in three dimensions: message (content), presenter (speaker/writer), and audience (reader/listener). Thus, each section of this course will provide support for your continued improvement as a writer/speaker (presenter) and as a reader/listener (audience) using a specific topic (content) in biochemistry and molecular biology.

The study of the resources required to solve problems in various models of computation. Sequential computation: Turing machines, non-determinism, alternation, algebraic automata theory. Parallel computation: Boolean circuits, branching programs, uniformity, lower bounds for circuit models. Descriptive complexity. Possible optional topics depending on student interest: approximation of NP-complete problems, interactive proofs, nonuniform finite automata, dynamic complexity.

The purpose of the course is to provide a common experience for Commonwealth Honors College students in their junior year. While recognizing that by the junior year students will be working in a wide variety of disciplinary areas, an interdisciplinary course like this will help honors students at the preliminary stage of thinking about a culminating senior thesis, project or capstone to experience a variety of topics and approaches that can lead to the development of their own senior culminating experience. Why a theme of innovative ideas across disciplines?

The purpose of the course is to provide a common experience for Commonwealth Honors College students in their junior year. While recognizing that by the junior year students will be working in a wide variety of disciplinary areas, an interdisciplinary course like this will help honors students at the preliminary stage of thinking about a culminating senior thesis, project or capstone to experience a variety of topics and approaches that can lead to the development of their own senior culminating experience. Why a theme of innovative ideas across disciplines?

The purpose of the course is to provide a common experience for Commonwealth Honors College students in their junior year. While recognizing that by the junior year students will be working in a wide variety of disciplinary areas, an interdisciplinary course like this will help honors students at the preliminary stage of thinking about a culminating senior thesis, project or capstone to experience a variety of topics and approaches that can lead to the development of their own senior culminating experience. Why a theme of innovative ideas across disciplines?

This course will introduce students to Bayesian data analysis, including modeling and computation. We will begin with a description of the components of a Bayesian model and analysis (including the likelihood, prior, posterior, conjugacy and credible intervals). We will then develop Bayesian approaches to models such as regression models, hierarchical models and ANOVA. Computing topics include Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. The course will have students carry out analyses using statistical programming languages and software packages.

Data is a core part of most modern applications. This honors course will focus on student-driven, in-depth study of fundamental topics in data management. Topics will include: remote access and security of online database systems, design and implementation of full-scale database-driven systems, and societal issues associated with data, such as ethics and fairness in a Big Data era.

Literature treating the relationship between man and woman. Topics may include: the nature of love, the image of the hero and heroine, and definitions, past and present, of the masculine and feminine. (Gen.Ed. AL, DG)

Literature that deals with our relationship to society. Topics may include: the utopian vision; the notion of the self, politics and literature. (Gen.Ed. AL, DG)

This is a course in applied physics with the ultimate goal of describing how stars work. Topics include gravitation, stellar mass determination, stellar structure, stellar atmospheres, stellar evolution, and the physics of pulsating stars. We will approach each of these topics from fundamental concepts and we will work our way to a detailed understanding. On the way we will review the structure of the atom, radiative processes, and some basic principles of thermodynamics.