Course Catalogue

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A series of guest lecturers will introduce students to current research work at the cutting edge of microscopy method development and application. Students will engage on a technical level with the work as presented in published papers and preprints, and will design new experiments based on what they have read.

There will be 11 one-hour lectures on campus, and 6 x 90-minute seminars for the whole group. Both could take place in either a raked or a flat teaching room, with flat being preferable for the seminars. Projectors and writing surfaces will be required.

This course requires core courses taken in earlier semesters of the International Master in Computational Microscopy, particularly the "Current Trends in Bioimaging" course offered in the first semester at University College Dublin.

None

Students will complete two comparative literature reviews, one where the papers are selected from a list, and one where the papers are chosen through literature searching. Each review will be worth 25% of the course mark, totalling 50%.

Students will give a 15 minute oral presentation summarising one of the literature reviews, assessed by staff. This is worth 25% of the course mark.

The final 25% of the course will be assessed through an experiment design challenge, where students collaborate in groups to produce written project proposals that draw on what they have learned through the course. This is included in the "Report" item above.

The course will connect students directly to cutting-edge microscopy researchers, bringing together a range of different guest lectures to talk about their imaging techniques and the biological challenges that drive them. Students will engage with the work on a technical level, developing a quantitative understanding of the capabilities and limitations of each technique. This course builds on the foundation of "Current Trends in Bioimaging" from the first semester of this 2-year MSc programme, introducing a different range of techniques and research questions as well as taking advantage of the students' more advanced training in microscopy to go into more depth on each research topic.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

■ Critically appraise the advantages and limitations of advanced imaging modalities.

■ Quantitatively compare the performance of different imaging systems based on published papers.

■ Explain a range of cutting-edge microscopy techniques that are not yet available as commercial instruments.

■ Apply knowledge gained from the module and from literature searching to propose novel instruments to acquire data on a particular biological system or problem.