The state of scientific knowledge shows that responses to climate change, biodiversity collapse, resources limits and pollutions require major transformations in all systems: energy, industry, agriculture and food, land use, transportation, infrastructure, and cities, at an unprecedented scale and speed.
The course aims to develop a systemic, historical and forward-looking understanding of complex natural and human systems dynamics and their interactions at play in sustainability issues and solutions. The course will consolidate a rigorous scientific culture and provide tools for analyzing and addressing the major issues of sustainable development in their environmental, economic, and social dimensions. It will lay the groundwork for developing mastery of analytical methods and skills to become engineers who are actors in the transformations that the current crisis calls for.
Given the breadth of the topic, the course cannot be comprehensive, nor go in depth into each dimension and method. Instead, it will launch first explorations, give some tools to navigate disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge, and, hopefully, the willingness to explore further and build one’s own path in our common future. The course aims to demonstrate how sustainable development concerns all sciences, research, and engineering. It also shows how the construction of responses and transformations represents challenges for science, research, and engineering. It will give a glimpse into some disciplines’ methods, but it is also resolutely multidisciplinary, and its structure aims to build cross-cutting visions between disciplines and themes.
In this class, you will collect your own environmental sample and study the diversity of its microorganism population. For this purpose, you are going to apply Oxford Nanopore sequencing in the wet lab and then analyse the results with computational methods of Bioinformatics.
By DNA preparation and sequencing, you will gain "first-contact" wet lab experience. In the larger part of this modal, you will analyse the generated data in depth using state-of-the-art Bioinformatic tools e.g. genome assembly, gene prediction, analysis of species diversity, and comparison of data sets. Thus, this modal provides an all-in-one combination of molecular-biology experiments and computational analysis. It introduces you to practical work in modern molecular biological research as well as motivates the exploration of bioinformatics methods from concrete analysis demands.
