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Biostatistics and Mathematical Biology

By Dr. Felix Bast   |   Central University of Punjab, Bathinda
Learners enrolled: 1305
This 12 weeks course will thoroughly cover basic mathematics essential for biologists. Traditional course Biostatistics offered across Indian universities usually do not cover topics such as Bayesian probability, Maximum Likelihood, Box-Plots, Statistical Power and sampling size estimation, Normality and Outlier tests, Non-linear regression and so on; this course is designed such a way to compensate that deficiency. In addition, mathematical skills essential for biologists are covered thoroughly as part of this course, including levels of measurements, permutations and combinations, tests for categorical data including Relative Risk, Odds Ratio and so on. Fun facts and games included in the course is expected to pique interest among the participants. Substantial time is spared to solve practice problems on whiteboard, making the comprehension easy. The course is application oriented and more importance is given for deciding which significance test to use, how to analyse the data and so on using computational softwares rather than manual solutions or using statistical tables.
Summary
Course Status : Completed
Course Type : Core
Duration : 12 weeks
Category :
  • Biological Sciences & Bioengineering
Credit Points : 3
Level : Postgraduate
Start Date : 13 Jan 2021
End Date : 30 Apr 2021
Enrollment Ends : 28 Feb 2021
Exam Date :

Page Visits



Course layout


Week 1 
Biostatistics and Mathematical Biology: An Introduction, Types of studies
Week 2 
Levels of measurements Summarizing the Data: Tabular Presentation
Week 3 
Summarizing the Data: Graphical Presentation Charting with Excel
Week 4 
Descriptive statistics: Point Estimates Descriptive Statistics: Interval Estimates Error Bars
Week 5
Moments, Normality Tests and Outliers Concepts of Population, Sample and Confidence Interval
Week 6
Statistical Hypothesis Testing  Statistical Significance and P-Values Relationship between Confidence Intervals and Statistical Significance
Week 7
Statistical Power and Choosing the right Sample Size t-Distribution and tests of significance based on t-distribution F-distribution and tests of significance based on F distribution
Week 8
χ2 Distribution and tests of significance based on χ2 distribution Comparing Proportions Gaussian, Binomial, Lognormal and Poisson Distributions
Week 9
Pearson’s Correlation Simple Linear Regression Non-Linear Regression
Week 10
Nonparametric tests Permutations and Combinations
Week 11
Probability Bayes Theorem and Likelihood
Week 12
Statistics with MS Excel and GraphPad Prism Key concepts of statistics Statistical Pitfalls to Avoid

Books and references


Motulsky, H. (2014). Intuitive biostatistics: a nonmathematical guide to statistical thinking. Oxford University Press, USA. Amazon link

Van Belle, G., Fisher, L. D., Heagerty, P. J., & Lumley, T. (2004). Biostatistics: a methodology for the health sciences(Vol. 519). John Wiley & Sons.

Le, C. T., & Eberly, L. E. (2016). Introductory biostatistics. John Wiley & Sons.

Instructor bio



Dr. Felix Bast

Central University of Punjab, Bathinda
Dr Felix Bast is an award winning teacher and science writer based at Central University of Punjab, Bathinda, Punjab. He is born in Kerala and received his B.Sc with university first rank and gold medal. He received his MSc from University of Madras, and worked at IIT Bombay as CSIR JRF. In 2005, he was selected under prestigious Monbukagakusho Japanese Government International Doctoral Fellowship and earned his PhD in molecular phylogenetics from MEXT, Japan (Monbukagakusho Japanese Government International Fellow) in 2010. 

Dr. Felix received a number of international recognitions and underwent training from a number of institutions worldwide. In 2007 he underwent 2 months’ research and training at Friday Harbor Laboratories, University of Washington with fellowship from National Science Foundation, USA. In 2009 and 2013, he underwent training at Natural History Museum, London (2009) and Marine Biological Association, Plymouth (2013), UK, Supported by International fellowships from British Phycological Society. In 2018 he received prestigious NAM-Leibniz International Fellowship and underwent 3 months’ research sabbatical at Leibniz-Zentrum für Marine Tropenforschung (ZMT), Bremen, Germany. In addition, he visited a number of countries for research works and dissemination of findings, including Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Canada, South Africa, Hong Kong, Thailand and China.

Dr. Felix received a number of national recognitions as well. He served as an invited in-residence intern with President of India as an “Inspired teacher” for one week at Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi in 2015. He had been a recipient of “INSA-INSPIRE Faculty Award” from Department of Science and Technology, Government of India in 2012. Dr. Felix received “Teaching Innovator Award” from MHRD, Govt. of India in 2019. He is an elected fellow of INSA-INYAS, New Delhi.  

His major research contributions include the discovery of three new species of marine algae from Indian coast (named after him), the discovery of endophytic algae from the Indian Ocean for the first time, and demystification of blood rain phenomenon. He is the Principal Investigator of 10 research and teaching grants from agencies including UGC, DST, Ministry of Earth Sciences, ICSSR, and Indian Academy of Sciences with a funding of 1.5 crore rupees. He has published more than 70 peer-reviewed publications in international journals and 3 books. Dr. Felix is actively involved in transdisciplinary research combining liberal arts with sciences. In 2014, he received a major research grant from ICSSR to work on linguistic phylogeny of Indian Languages and did pioneering studies on phylolinguistics of Dravidian and Indo-Aryan language families. He has guided 1 PostDoc, 9 PhDs, 16 M.Phil, 24 MSc and 1 international exchange fellow.  Dr. Felix is an early adopter of e-learning and involved with UGC e-PG pathshala and UGC SWAYAM MOOC. In 2016 Dr. Felix undertook an expedition to Antarctica, and stayed at India’s research stations, Bharti and Maitri, as part of Ministry of Earth Sciences “Indian Scientific Expedition to Antarctica-36” delegation from December 2016 to April 2017. Dr. Felix is a known science writer in India with his contributions regularly appearing in Resonance, Science Reporter, Dream2047, The Hindu, Times of India and so on. He is also involved with science education and popularization with a number of science outreach talks at local schools, libraries, colleges and universities.

His website is accessible at the following URL: http://bit.ly/FelixLab

Course certificate

30 Marks will be allocated for Internal Assessment and 70 Marks will be allocated for external proctored examination


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