This is a third-year core course offered by the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UVA. Dr. Dolatshahi has been teaching this course since Fall 2020.

Fall 2023 Learning Guide/Syllabus

Fall 2023 Schedule

Systems analysis plays a critical role in interpreting biological data, designing medical equipment, and understanding complex biological processes. Systems problems are emerging as central to all areas of biomedicine—including but not limited to cancer, immunology, infectious disease, musculoskeletal disorders, and cardiology. The overarching goal of this How to denoise an MRI image? How to model blood circulation? How to analyze ECG? course is to promote quantitative thinking from a systems perspective. To this end, we will learn analytical approaches for modeling signals and systems and apply them to solve real world biomedical problems, such as predicting tumor growth, analyzing ECG signals, and processing medical images. We will learn the central systems thinking underlying various flavors of biomedical systems ranging from electrical and mechanical to chemical and molecular systems. Once you see the resemblance between these systems, then you can get creative and apply what you learned to your favorite biomedical problems in novel ways!

How are vaccines developed? Why does immunotherapy work in some cancers but not in others? How can machine learning and AI enrich immunology research? These questions are just a small fraction of those that can be approached with systems immunology. Systems approaches are gaining traction in many different areas of biomedical engineering due to their ability to integrate information across spatial and temporal scales which is difficult, or even impossible, to do with conventional techniques.

This course aims to help you take the first steps in becoming proficient in both immunology and systems biology. We will employ systems and quantitative approaches to understand normal and pathological functions of the immune system and identify engineering solutions that leverage or modulate the immune system. We will develop computational models (mechanistic, statistical, and machine-learning) of the immune system organization, function, and regulation at various scales with a combination of lectures and hands-on projects. We aim to show you how these state-of-the-art computational and engineering tools may be used to develop unbiased and out of the box hypotheses that have the potential to bridge the many knowledge gaps that still exist in immunology. At the end of this course, we hope that you are equipped with the skills you need to think like a systems immunologist, with the tools you need to feel confident in your ability to solve the many novel and difficult problems facing the field.

This is a graduate-level course offered to graduate students in the Microbiology, Immunology and Cancer Biology (MIC) program in biomedical sciences, directed by Dr. Melanie Rutkowski, where Dr. Dolatshahi teaches the “Integrative Systems Biology” module since Fall 2021- present. The goal of this class is to integrate the knowledge that was gained during the MICR8200/8202, with more focus upon learning techniques, critically reading papers, and communicating findings in papers through written documents.