Industry Practice Program
Industry-linkage is one of the most prominent features of the M.Tech. program.
- One full semester devoted to practice in industry, called Internship, under the joint guidance of industry and NU supervisors. Internship carries a weightage of 12 credits.
- An R&D project of 8 credits during the summer term for which industry supervisors can indicate the nature of the project in which they would like their candidates to work on.
- One elective course of 4 credits customized to the requirement of the sponsoring industry.
Thus, effectively 24 out of 74 credits are aligned directly to the goals of sponsoring industry.
The program is structured into four semesters with the first two semesters devoted to theoretical and hands-on practical training in foundation and advanced courses. This is followed by a summer term at the end of first year during which the R&D project work is undertaken. In the third semester, the student obtains specialization in a specific domain by selecting appropriate elective courses. This is followed by Internship/Thesis in the fourth semester which is executed in the organization, which has sponsored the student.
Courses in biochemistry, molecular biology, and information technology along with mathematics/statistics, introduction to operating systems and programming languages, usage of biological databases, and networking required for bioinformatics form the part of the foundation courses.
Advanced topics in bioinformatics include the science behind various sequence analyses, pattern recognition, parallel computing, application of bioinformatics to drug design and discovery, database creation and management, data warehousing & mining and modeling of metabolic pathways, cheminformatics, and phylogenetic analysis.
Software packages related to sequence analysis, modeling of biological structures and studying intermolecular interactions, structure activity relationships, etc. are available for hands-on experience and learning. Students get practical experience of various techniques of genetic engineering such as PCR amplification, gene cloning and DNA sequencing at the well developed state-of-the-art laboratories at NU. This sharpens their skills to validate the hypothesis developed through computational models.