About us

Background The Faculty of Bionics and Information Technologies aims at the
education of anthropocentric information technology based on a broad spectrum of
fundamental subjects including the basics of biology, as well as state-of-the-art
electronic engineering and measuring technologies. Bionics is a special focus of the
Faculty which can be defined as n industry emerging from the synergies of
information technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology, with large and rapidly
growing markets in the biomedical area. The Faculty believes that this broad area of
innovative technologies requires a new kind of experts able to combine a variety of
skills ranging from advanced computer programming to instruments design to
microfluidics to high-throughput bioinformatics.

The Bioinformatics Lab (BL) was established in 2010, with the aim of creating a
novel bioinformatics curriculum tailored to the needs of bionics students. This is a
challenging task as bioinformatics is becoming the central medium of scientific
discoveries, medical diagnosis and biological data collection. We believe that
teaching bioinformatics to the next generation of engineers requires more than
teaching only algorithms and software tools as often seen in traditional bioinformatics
courses, but rather it requires a) an introduction to the unifying principles underlying
current methods of data collection and data interpretation, as well as b) thematic
lectures in selected areas. A key of this approach is to divide the course into theory
and hands-on sessions, the latter of which concentrates on programming tools,
software and databases.

An essential part of this curriculum are competitive BSc, MSc and PhD research
projects capable to provide a strong bioinformatics background related to various
fields of genomics. Our current projects include genomics of bacterial communities,
development of next generation bioinformatics tools and advance methods of mining
biological data.