NBIO 303, Coding and Computation, ran annually in winter quarter in correspondence with NBIO 301, Cellular Neurobiology. *** NOW AMATH342. ****
The primary goal of this course is to act as a mathematically and computationally oriented companion course to NBIO 301, although it may be taken in isolation on consultation with the lecturers. The course is an introduction to computational neuroscience, with a particular focus on concepts that are related to neuronal and synaptic biophysics that parallel the lecture and laboratory material of NBIO 301. The course will work through mathematical concepts and methods to describe neuronal dynamics, and will introduce methods to analyze and characterize neural coding. The course will make use of Matlab as a programming language to implement models of neuronal dynamics and perform data analysis. Some instruction in Matlab will be provided, although students will be expected to have some Matlab or other programming background or be willing to work on it on their own using provided materials. Topics are chosen to expand upon and extend material from the NBIO 301 laboratory class. Students will be encouraged to deepen that connection by choosing a computationally oriented project for NBIO 301 that draws on material from the course. The course will meet once weekly for 2 hours. The first hour will be in lecture format, and the second hour will be in workshop/tutorial format, when students will be able to work on Matlab or other computational problems with guidance from the lecturer.
Prerequisites: Equivalent of 200 level calculus, otherwise by permission of instructor.
See the following for additional course information about NBIO 303.
For current course website (some material for participants only), see here.
Fairhall lab 