Master courses

Courses at the MSc level; these courses are obligatory for students doing their main training period at the department. 

Pattern Recognition in the Natural Sciences (SM299)

Lecturers: G. Postma, A. Carnoli
The course 'Pattern Recognition in the Natural Sciences' (PRiNS) gives an in-depth coverage of the most important pattern recognition techniques.
It is a course at the MSc level for 3 EC. The course book will be 'The Elements of Statistical Learning' by Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman.
A study guide is available from the 'Documentation' section; it contains many computer exercises that should help you understand the principles behind the methods, and allow you to analyse data sets yourself. The workhorse is the statistical package R, freely available for Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems.

The course is open to all master students with an appropriate background.

Omics (NWI-MOL410)

Lecturers: G. Pruijn & T. Offermans
The course Omics is part of the master track 'Chemistry for Life' and is intended to familiarize the students with the concepts, methods and models that are commonplace in chemical biology, more specifically in the 'omics platforms' of Systems Biology. The course will cover the principles of modelling and visualisation of analytical chemical data from biological experiments, 'standard' data analysis methods like Principal Component Analysis, clustering and several classification methods.
It is a course at the MSc level for 3 EC.

The course is open to all master students with an appropriate background. Prior knowledge that is expected is Introductory Statistics and basic linear algebra.

Industrial Chemistry (NWI-MOL419)

lecturers: H.J. van Manen & F. Rutjes
In this course you will become acquainted with a variety of aspects of industrial chemistry, meaning typically larger scale chemistry that is carried out in a commercial setting in industry.

Handheld Spectroscopy (NWI-MOL420)

lecturers: G.Tinnevelt
Traditional methods of quantifying chemicals in a wet chemistry lab are usually time-consuming, destructive and/or use expensive equipment. Recent development of low-cost visible-shortwave Near InfraRed (NIR) instruments has allowed fast and non-invasive measurements. Moreover, handheld spectrometers allows the measurements to take place outside the lab, e.g. in the supermarket or at home. These handheld spectrometers have applications in food quality, polymer recycling or even textile fraud detection. During the course the students will set up their own research project and develop an analysis strategy.

We encourage students from all fields of Natural Sciences to participate, as the principles raised in the course apply to all branches of quantitative research.

Chemometrics II (SM103A)

Supervision: department staff members
In this course, various subjects and techniques of Chemometrics are treated in detail by means of lectures given by students. Each student presents one lecture of 45 minutes on a relevant chemometrical technique. The course is obligatory for students who do their training period on the department, and can be done during the internship.

Master internship

Supervision: department staff members
Students can choose a main training period of 9-12 months, or a secondary training period of 6 months. During this period, they contribute to one of the research projects of the department, usually under the guidance of one of the Ph.D. students. They can contribute to EC projects and co-operations with industries.

See FNWI study prospectus for the most recent information about our courses.