NEW DOCTORAL STUDY COURSES ARE NOW OPEN FOR REGISTRATION

During the spring semester of 2014/2015 senior scientists of the Estonian Genome Center, University of Tartu, will teach three new courses for PhD students in English. The courses are now open for registration and the number of participants is limited!

The course aims to provide a strong foundation in human genomics by introducing classical genetic principles and the latest technology and methods available for studying diseases and traits. Human genomics is introduced as an increasingly important part of modern medicine. This course will focus on the fundamental aspects of human genomics. Classical genetic principles will be combined with modern methods, with a strong emphasis on applications to human biology and medicine. Topics covered will include fundamental principles of genetics, genomics, and genetic variation, patterns of inheritance of disorders, genome-wide methods for identifying disease susceptibility genes, investigating pharmacogenomics and epigenetics. Clinical examples are used throughout the course to illustrate how and when the different methods can be applied. The lectures are followed by seminars where the students are required to study journal articles and make presentations.

The course aims to provide basic knowledge of common statistical methods for genetic data analysis and the ability to apply these methods using the R software and present the results in a publication-quality format. The course consists of lectures, hands-on computer practicals and homework exercises.

In the first half of the course the basic concepts of probability theory and descriptive statistics, probability distributions, confidence intervals and basic statistical tests will be studied in the context of genetic data. Thereafter, classical and generalized linear models will be introduced (ordinary least squares regression and analysis of variance, logistic regression, etc), as well as basics of principal component analysis and cluster analysis. Finally, the concepts of causal inference

(analysis methods to assess causality, such as Mendelian Randomization) and basics of statistical simulation will be introduced. The course also covers basics of study design and power/sample size calculation methods.

The aim of this course it to introduce the main methods in genetic epidemiology and how to use them in practice. This course teaches how to use both genotyping and resequencing data for association analysis. This course contains theoretical lectures, computer courses and seminars, where all participants will select a common disease and will give a presentation about the current status of its genetics.

This course will cover following terms and methods: Mendelian inheritance, genetic markers, imputation, probabilities and basics of statistics, correlation and association, linkage and association analysis.