Biological Modeling: A Short Tour

by Phillip Compeau (Author, Editor), Mert İnan (Contributor), Noah Lee (Contributor)

Biological Modeling: A Short Tour offers readers a deep but concise exploration of topics in modeling biological systems at multiple scales. Each chapter poses a single biological question, from why zebras have stripes, to how bacteria explore their world intelligently, to why the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein was so effective at binding to human cells. The book then introduces the modeling concepts needed to answer this question. The book website provides a free online course containing dozens of interactive tutorials allowing readers to build and explore the models introduced in this book. The course was produced with the help of talented students at Carnegie Mellon University who appear in the book as chapter co-authors.

Genres: Science, Textbooks

256 pages, Paperback

Published January 25, 2023

About the author

Phillip Compeau is an Associate Teaching Professor and the Assistant Department Head for Education in the Computational Biology Department in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. He directs the undergraduate program in computational biology, co-directs the Precollege Program in Computational Biology, and serves as Assistant Director of the Master's in Computational Biology program (http://www.cmu.edu/ms-compbio/). He is the co-author of Bioinformatics Algorithms: An Active Learning Approach (http://bioinformaticsalgorithms.org).

Phillip co-created the first massive open online course (MOOC) in bioinformatics, which has grown into the Bioinformatics Specialization on Coursera (https://www.coursera.org/specializati...). He also co-founded Rosalind (http://rosalind.info), an online platform for learning bioinformatics that has reached tens of thousands of learners around the world.

Phillip is also the founder of Programming for Lovers (http://compeau.cbd.cmu.edu/programmin...), a free online course in introductory programming motivated by fun scientific applications.