Genomics

Genomics is where you stop thinking about single genes and start treating entire genomes as data — figuring out how to actually pull biological meaning out of the firehose of sequence reads that modern instruments produce. Most weeks pair a lecture on a sub-area (comparative, meta-, epi-, cancer, systems) with a hands-on lab in Galaxy, Ensembl, UCSC, GNOMAD, VEP, IGV, or cBioPortal, plus two midterms, lab quizzes, and a presentation. It sits downstream of molecular biology and biochemistry and is essentially the bridge into bioinformatics-heavy research, so anyone considering a thesis in MBG or a computational-biology track ends up leaning on these skills constantly.