The new course launched by the School of Sciences, in partnership with FFUP and ICBAS, will start in the 2023/24 academic year.
The Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto (FCUP), in partnership with the Faculty of Pharmacy (FFUP) and the Institute of Biomedical Sciences Abel Salazar (ICBAS), will launch, in the next academic year 2023/24, the new degree in Bioinformatics, an interdisciplinary course at the interface of the current revolutions in Biology and Computer Science.
Funded under the Recovery and Resilience Program (RRP), this course aims to train future large-scale biological and biomedical data analysts.
With a strong focus on specialization in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, the course, which will have 25 openings in the National Competition for Access to Higher Education 2023/2024, has a strong curricular structure so that students acquire knowledge and skills transversal to biochemistry and biology, mathematics, computer science, artificial intelligence, and data science.
“It involves the development and application of computational algorithms and tools, namely artificial intelligence and machine learning, to organize, analyze, and extract relevant information from large sets of biological data, contributing to advances in areas such as genomics and other omics, genetics, systems biology, pathology, ecology, evolution, epidemiology, among others,” details Pedro G. Ferreira, acting director of the degree, professor at FCUP and researcher at the Institute for Systems Engineering and Computers, Technology and Science.
Career opportunities include scientific-technological activities in Health Institution Laboratories (e.g. hospital centers, public health institutes) and Research and Development in pharmaceutical companies, diagnostic centers or software companies.
The degree in Bioinformatics is the result of a joint strategy of FCUP (seat of the course), with FFUP and ICBAS, in close partnership with the University Hospital Center of Porto and a number of research centers and companies.
One more step on an ambitious path
With the new degree in Bioinformatics, the number of degrees created from scratch under the U.Porto’s Multidisciplinary Training Program has risen to four, the ambitious program supported by the RRP which hopes to attract more than 9,500 new students to the University of Porto by June 2026.
In the National Competition for Access to Higher Education (CNAES) 2022/2023, applications are open for the first time fordegrees in Drawing, Literature and Interarts Studies, and Applied Mathematics.
The same program also foresees an increase in the number of vacancies in the degrees in Agronomic Engineering and Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, as well as the reinforcement of vacancies in study cycles in STEAM areas classified with an index of excellence.
