Written by: College of Science January 1, 2021 ESS 490 / ATS 590Advanced Forecasting for Decision Support Services Decision Support Services (DSS) have become the cornerstone of National Weather Service operations & training. This course explores 1) advanced weather forecasting, 2) weather warning operations, 3) importance of messaging & communicating threats, 4) how to tailor forecasts to meet partners' needs. Prerequisites: ESS 352, ATS 410. ESS 490 / ESS 590 Geography of Infectious Diseases The geographic spread of historic and emerging infectious diseases, including COVID-19, is examined. Students develop an understanding of how and where infectious diseases have spread historically and how they may spread in the future, by analyzing the natural and human factors that influence them. Prerequisites: ESS 103, ESS 111. ESS 690Water - A Global Crisis This class will examine declining global water availability, its threat to human populations, and how we will need to forever change the way we think about water, our relationship to it, and the creativity we will need to bring to protect it. This course will guide the student in the dynamics of the global water crisis and its impacts upon current and future civilizations. Potential solutions will be examined to address this growing crisis. BYS 491 and BYS 691 Animal Behavior This course is an introduction to animal behavior. The course will examine behavior, genetics, physiology of behavior, ecology of behavior, and the evolution of behavior. Assigned readings from the scientific literature, exams, and inquiry-based activities/assignments in class will be used to explore these topics. BYS 491Human Evolution and Culture Are humans still evolving? Is love at first sight real? Does cultural evolution slow our biological evolution? This course will provide an overview of key principles of evolution. It will cover how evolutionary theory relates to our day to day lives from dating to disease prevention. We will also discuss how our technological and pharmaceutical advances are shaping contemporary evolution of non-human species. BYS 691Molecular Biology Techniques The principles and practice of instruments and techniques used in biological, biomedical, biophysical and environmental sciences. A very practical approach will be implemented to make sure that students learn and understand the use and importance of these instruments. The course is designed to provide students with the training they require to calibrate, operate and interpret ate generated from instruments commonly in use in biological laboratories. BYS 491 Ornithology An examination of birds, including classification, diversity, anatomy, function, ecology, behavior, and evolution. Laboratory and field trips devoted to anatomy and identification, with an emphasis on Alabama and southeastern U.S. species. Prerequisites: BYS 219, BYS 312, or equivalent. BYS 691 Ornithology An examination of birds, including classification, diversity, anatomy, function, ecology, behavior, and evolution. Laboratory and field trips devoted to anatomy and identification, with an emphasis on Alabama and southeastern U.S. species. By instructor permission. BYS 691 Practical Biosafety This course provides an overview of laboratory safety and biosafety: the practices, equipment, documentation and facilities for the safe and secure handling, use, and storage of chemicals and biological material in a laboratory setting, with a focus on hands-on practical applications. BYS 491 and BYS 691 Signal Transduction This course will introduce the broad principles of intracullular signal transduction. More detail lectures and specific intracellular signaling pathways will be given where students will learn both the basic and the most recent and cutting edge concepts of intracellular signaling. Appropriate for undergraduate and graduate studies in biological sciences, researchers new to the field, and those actively working in the general area. BYS CH 735Poly(amino acid)s This class focuses on the synthesis and characterization of poly(amino acid)s. In this inaugural class the focus will be placed on poly(glutamine), poly(Q), and its role in neurodegenerative diseases. Huntingtons disease and many other neurodegenerative diseases classified as poly(Q) diseases involve or are caused by aggregation and misfolding of long chains of poly(glutamine). In Huntingtons disease, these extended chains of poly(Q) are over 35 glutamine residues long and lead to oxidative stress and neurotoxicity that damages the corpus striatum in the brain and causes motor and behavioral changes in those who contract the disease. Poly(Q) diseases generally begin in adulthood and progress over the course of 10 to 30 years, ultimately resulting in death, with the length of the poly(Q) chains directly correlated to disease time of onset. Research on poly(Q) chains is needed to determine the role that these extended chains play in causing poly(Q) diseases, as the pathway between chain growth and disease onset is not known. There is currently no cure for poly(Q) diseases, but with research into the behavior of extended poly(Q) chains and their interactions with cells and tissues, it may be possible to find means of slowing the progress of poly(Q) diseases or stopping them entirely. However, in order for such research to be undertaken, it is necessary to have poly(Q) chains of the proper, varying lengths to study. Prerequisite: CH 540. MA 490 and MA 690Differential Calculus Topics include: normed vector spaces; Banach spaces; exponential mappings; differentiation; directional derivatives; differentiability of the norm; mean value theorems; higher derivatives and differentials; higher partial differentials; Taylor theorems; Hilbert spaces; distance; projections; Riesz representation theorem; convex functions; continuity and differentiability of convex functions; the inverse and implicit mapping theorems; vector fields; existence of integral curvatures; complete vector fields; the flow of a vector field; continuity of the flow; calculus of variations; Lagrangian mappings; and Euler-Lagrange equations. Prerequisite: MA 452. MA 690Graph Decompositions Packings and coverings of graphs; Clique partitions, finite geometries, and block designs; edge-colorings and Goldberg’s Conjecture; Cyclic decompositions and vertex labelings of graphs; Path decompositions and Gallai’s Conjecture; Decompositions into trees. Prerequisites: MA 640 or instructor approval. SPA 689 Supercomputer Lab for Physical Sciences This course will use a hands-on approach to introduce graduate students with a background in physical or natural sciences to modern HPC technologies. It will cover three common parallelization frameworks (MPI, pthreads, CUDA) applied to problems in gas dynamics, transport, and plasma physics. Prerequisite: SPA 662. For more information, contact the College of Science at Science.Academics@uah.edu.
