Students enrolled in a UW–Madison doctoral program can pursue a doctoral minor in biophysics. The doctoral minor offers substantial training in biophysics and can serve as a supplement to training in a broad range of disciplines in which biology, chemistry, physics, and medicine intersect. The biophysics minor will give students a rigorous understanding of quantitative approaches to biological, physical, and chemical problems in the life sciences. Course offerings that provide pedagogical instruction to biophysics students serve as the basis for the biophysics minor.
Admissions
All Graduate School students must utilize the Graduate Student Portal in MyUW to add, change, or discontinue any doctoral minor. To apply to this minor, log in to MyUW, click on Graduate Student Portal, and then click on Add/Change Programs. Select the information for the doctoral minor for which you are applying.
Requirements
| Code | Title | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| Required Courses | ||
| CHEM 665 | Biophysical Chemistry | 3 |
| CHEM 668 | Biophysical Spectroscopy | 3 |
| Advanced Elective Courses | 3 | |
| Choose one or more of the following to reach the required minimum 9 credits. Students may also choose any course used to satisfy the advanced elective requirement for the Biophysics PhD program: | ||
| Protein and Enzyme Structure and Function | ||
| Prokaryotic Molecular Biology | ||
| Eukaryotic Molecular Biology | ||
| Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience | ||
| Total Credits | 9 | |
People
Program Leadership
Director
- Dr. Alessandro Senes, Professor, Department of Biochemistry
Associate Director
- Dr. Silvia Cavagerno, Professor, Department of Chemistry
Faculty Trainers
Our broad inter-departmental program consists of approximately 60 faculty trainers from departments that belong to five different colleges (Letter & Science, Agriculture & Life Sciences, Engineering, and the Schools of Medicine and Pharmacology). This highly collaborative environment offers a spectrum of opportunities that include, for example, protein structure/function and engineering, nucleic acid and membrane biophysics, neuroscience, virology, as well as synthetic and system biology applied to both bacterial and eukaryotic organisms. These areas of research share the common goal of understanding biological systems in physical and mechanistic terms, the use of cutting-edge quantitative instrumental methods, and, frequently, the integration of computation and machine learning. Please find an overview of our research areas on the program’s website.
Staff
Graduate Program Manager
- Michael Sullivan