ProfIyengar

Yes. Our systems biology center is part of a national consortium of NIH-funded centers from other universities. So we often share our course materials with them. We also have had several interactions with researchers in the pharmaceutical industry who would like to widen their horizons and learn and become experts in multiple modeling approaches.

So far our MOOCs have been successful for at least three reasons: 1. Because it connects people who want to learn with material that is organized for interdisciplinary expertise. 2. The COURSERA platform is widely used and easy accessible. 3. It allows students in one discipline such as biology or applied math to gain expertise in a complimentary discipline.

Our center currently is focused on transcriptomic signatures for cardio-toxicity of protein-kinase inhibitor drugs. Our data are released on an ongoing basis and posted on our website. Data can be downloaded and analyzed freely.

You can start with Cell and Molecular Biology. A good 200 level course will be very useful. Be sure to do the problem sets!

It is hard to say. Please remember that even what seems intuitive is a computed output from human thought. We do not as yet understand how such complex computations occur within the brain. It will be very hard to predict how the explicit computation in systems biology is represented in the human brain. Time lines are nearly impossible to predict because often science moves in spurts based on breakthrough discoveries.