Course Work

The QBM course work aims to provide students with cross- and interdisciplinary training to bridge the gap between quantitative and qualitative approaches in biosciences.

Note, non-QBM LMU MSc and PhD students can register on Moodle via their LMU account here for each course separately.

 

  • Primer Courses: To build a stronger foundation in the disciplines outside a student’s primary field of training, we offer targeted feeder courses that are specifically designed to teach relevant basics to non-specialists. Depending on their background and needs, life science students can take a “crash course“ in Math and introductional programming courses in Matlab, Python and R. Based on these courses, QBM offers primers in biophysics, statistics and  bioinformatics. Math/physics students have the opportunity to take primers in life sciences and optionally bioinformatics. Students from the field of  bio-informatics take primers in biophysics and optionally statistics. During all courses students will work with hands-on examples and real data sets.

 

  • Bonus Courses: Depending on the individual requirements of their PhD projects or just out of personal interest, QBM students can vote for optional advanced topics such as Bayesian Statistics and Inference, AI in Matlab or Python and more. These courses have small classes of 5 -10 students.

 

  • Lecture Series: QBM students suggest, invite and host external speakers at this monthly event. The lectures on QBM-relevant topics  are complemented with a journal club with the guest speaker. Each QBM student should host a speaker at least once during the PhD and should have visited at least ten lecture series events.

 

  • Soft Skill Courses: Even the best research results won’t be well recognized by the community if not presented in a clear and coherent way. To learn that, we provide Soft Skill Courses like Scientific Writing, Presentation Skills and Good Scientific Practice.

 

  • QBM retreat: This annual event brings all QBM students together in an informal scientific environment where they present their research in brief talks and posters, and attend lectures of invited speakers.

 

External events:

We also encourage the students to attend international conferences, workshops, summer schools at LMU or other institutions, as well as advanced courses relevant to their research work. Additionally, the students have various opportunities to participate in events within the Munich scientific community, following their own research interests. These events include lecture series, symposia, and workshops offered by five collaborative research centers (SFBs) represented within QBM, the Center for NanoScience (CeNS), and the excellence clusters Nanosystems Initiative Munich (NIM) and the Center for Integrated Protein Science Munich (CIPSM), the Max-Planck-Institute of Biochemistry and the Helmholtz Center Munich.