Short course

The Department of Food and Nutritional Sciences is delighted to host a (free) two-day course:

An introduction to dynamic model building in food science, microbiology and biochemistry

May 11-12, 2009

Lecturer: Prof. E. Parente
Dipartimento di Biologia, Difesa e Biotecnologie Agro-Forestali – Università degli Studi della Basilicata, Potenza, Italy
(http://www2.unibas.it/parente/HomeEP.html

This course is intended for MSc/PhD students (and research staff) in Biology, Microbiology, Biochemistry and Chemistry and provides an introduction to dynamic model building in biology and biochemistry. Most of the examples focus on Microbiology, Fermentation and Biochemistry, but can be easily extended to other fields

At the end of the course students

will know the principles of the development of a dynamic model for a simple biological system
will be able to use software tools for dynamic model building
will be able to develop a simple dynamic model for a biological or chemical system.

Course content
Lectures: Introduction. Static, comparative static and dynamic models. Principles of modelling. Model components: stocks, constants, converters, flows, etc. Ordinary differential equations, difference equations, discrete elements; integration methods. Model validation. Examples of dynamic models in microbiology, bioihemistry, biology, ecology.
Workshop: An introduction to the use of Berkeley Madonna.

Suggested reading
Hannon B., Ruth M. 1997. Modeling dynamic biological systems. Springer
Macey R., Oster G., Zahnley. 2000. Berkeley Madonna User’s Guide. UC Berkeley.

Interested students and staff please contact Prof Paul McSweeney (p.mcsweeney@ucc.ie) for further details.