Introduction to Systems Biology: multicellular organisms, and cell biology
These elective courses are aimed at undergraduate and graduate students with little background in Biology and Math that would like to understand how can mathematical modeling be useful in understanding biological phenomena. Each course is given once every two years and involves a small project and a final exam.
Physiology of Organ Systems
Physiology tries to explain how stuff works, in our body. I teach in the gastrointestinal segment and endocrine segment in the preclinical studies. We learn that the gastrointestinal tract is more than a sponge with some digestive enzymes. It is a smart and regenerative system composed of many organs and sub-systems, regulated by hormones and a couple of nervous systems, that together with our gastrointestinal microbes is able to digest and absorb a wide variety of food in a highly coordinated fashion.
In endocrinology, we study general principles of endocrine regulation such as negative and integral feedback and focus on some systems such as calcium regulation, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, thyroid gland, and energy homeostasis.
Data Science for Biomedical and Medical Students
Freshmen class: Introduction to calculus and to linear algebra focusing on biomedical applications such as the SIR model for Covid19, viewing data as vector spaces, dimensionality reduction, and basic computational ideas in modern biomedical science. We also learn R and use it to understand the theoretical mathematical concepts.