Annual Report 2010

Annual Report 2010

Finnish Doctoral Programme in Computational Sciences (FICS)

Until the end of 2009, the Department of Computer Science co-ordinated the Graduate School in Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, and Biometry (ComBi). As of 2010, ComBi joined with the Finnish Doctoral Programme in Computational Sciences (FICS). FICS is a network of 22 departments in 9 universities in Finland. Computational science forms a new "third pillar" of scientific inquiry, complementing theory and experimentation. FICS brings together the core methodological topics and important fields of application of computational sciences: (1) Computational Statistics and Information Technology (2) Numerical and Applied Mathematics (3) Computational Physics (4) Computational Biology and (5) Future Computational Sciences (economics, medicine, agriculture, humanities, ecology, neuroscience etc.). FICS educates Doctors with high-end methodical expertise, who apply it in their thesis work while developing methods for solving computational, data-analysis and modelling issues in application areas. This work is carried out in close co-operation with one or more research groups in the application fields.

In 2010 FICS had a total of 82 full-time doctoral students, of which 26 (32%) were foreign and 19 (23%) were female. FICS post-graduates attended numerous international courses and conferences. During 2010, six FICS research students defended their PhD theses.