Course Leader: Dr Douglas Speirs
Location: Each four-day course is fully residential based at the
Ross Priory Conference Centrelocated on the beautiful shores of Loch Lomond.
Funding: There are 9 fully-funded places available on each course. This covers fees, travel, accommodation and subsistence. Priority is given to applicants whose research is at least 50% supported by NERC.
This course will provide a basic understanding of modelling and it uses in environmental. The course will ‘lift the lid’ of mathematical models and teach you how to build your own ordinary differential equation models from the ground-up using the open-source R programming environment.
In this course we'll show you how to formulate biological, ecological, or physical problem in terms of ordinary differential equations, code and solve them in R. We'll start by examining simple food chain system and disease models, and progress to formulating and constructing basic models from scratch.
The course is designed to be very practically orientated, with short lecture sessions interspersed with hands-on practical work. With a high staff to student ratio, we can offer near 1-to-1 attention. In addition, we encourage you to come prepared to give a short presentation on your own projects. As a class we then consider how each of these projects can be posed in terms of differential equations, and work in groups to translate them into operation R-code. In the past, students have left with working models of their systems. This is the most innovative, exciting and challenging part of the course - especially for the tutors! We do not know in any detail in advance what problems the students will turn up with.
The course assumes existing familiarity with programming in R, and of basic calculus.
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