Informatics Certificate Courses

The Informatics Certificate is a 15 semester hour interdisciplinary post-baccalaureate certificate consisting of 3 core courses + 2 discipline specifics courses.

Informatics CORE Courses (Three 3-hour courses)

The core content of the program is designed to develop competencies in information and knowledge management, critical thinking, organizational culture and strategy, communication and team building, as well as in data mining.

• ITEC 693: Selected Topics in Information Technology: Information Sources and Management I (3 hours) Course covers selected topics in informatics and information technology including private and public information sources, database construction methods and considerations, verification methods for data entry and validity, metadata types/formats/standards, data standards, communicate and manage change, information management systems, etc.
• MKTG 671: Data Mining (3 hours) This course introduces basic concepts, tasks, methods, and techniques in data mining. The emphasis is on various data mining problems and their solutions. Students will develop an understanding of the data mining process and issues, learn various techniques for data mining, and apply the techniques in solving data mining problems using data mining tools and systems. Students will also be exposed to a sample of data mining applications.
• ITEC 693: Selected Topics in Information Technology: Information Sources and Management II (3 hours) Capstone experience for students completing each concentration in Informatics Certificate sequence. Required attendance and presentation of student project at annual Summer Informatics Conference hosted by Radford University.

Informatics FOCUS AREA Courses (Two 3 hour courses in your discipline)

The remaining coursework of six credit hours will be selected from one of the four discipline areas, allowing students to pursue technical competencies that meet their particular interests and career goals.

Healthcare Informatics

• CHHS 686 Special Topics: Foundations of Health Care Informatics (3 hours) Introduces health care professionals to standards, concepts, and computing tools that provide a foundation for working in health information technology.
• CHHS 686 Special Topics: Project Management for Health Care Information Systems (3 hours) Prepares entry level health care IT/IS project managers who can facilitate complex systems life cycles and ensure projects are completed to meet stakeholders' and users' notions of quality that are also on time and within budget.

Security & Intelligence Informatics

• CRJU 690: Seminar: Investigative Data Mining (3 hours) This course explores the technology and application of data mining and analysis for the specific purpose of crime prevention and counter-terrorism. Using the techniques of advance data mining, and the application of open- and secure-source intelligence analysis, this course will teach the student how to identify trends, patterns and sequences, which are indicative of pre-crime activity by hostile elements. The student will acquire the necessary skills to prevent criminal and terrorist activity through threat assessment and risk management.
• CRJU 690: Spatial Aspects of Criminal Intelligence Analysis (3 hours) This course introduces the student-analyst to the techniques of exploratory spatial data analysis. Through the application of GIS technology to the analysis of crime trends and patterns, the student will learn to identify hot spot activities and the evolution of geographic crime focus areas over time. Consideration will be given to the tactical, strategic and administrative analysis of geo-spatial crime data with the intent of effective intervention and prevention of criminal activity.

Geoinformatics

• GEOG 580: Seminar: Practical Issues in GIS (3 hours) GIS in its various forms and the practical issues associated with it, ranging from appropriateness of the technology applied to practical issues dealing with source data, analysis, modeling, and analytical results and output-types.
• GEOG 680: Advanced Topics in Geospatial Analysis: Spatial Analysis with GIS (3 hours) Spatial Analysis is the key to the ultimate use of GIS technologies, both, in terms of querying data sets against each other, inclusion and exclusion of data, within and adjacency searches, as well as in the utilization of the spatial datasets and the subsequent modeling of various situations superimposed on these datasets, such as hydrologic modeling within a watershed under different building densities/ground coverages with impervious materials, etc.

Bioinformatics

• BIOL 581: Special Topics in Biology: Introduction to Bioinformatics (3 hours) This course will provide an understanding of the fundamental computational problems in molecular biology and a core set of commonly used algorithms. This is the first of two courses on bioinformatics. The topics covered will include: pairwise sequence alignment, multiple sequence alignment, finding genes in DNA sequences, phylogenetic tree construction, and genome mapping and sequencing.
• BIOL 681: Advanced Topics in Biology: Advanced Bioinformatics. (Proteomics and Genomics) (3 hours) Prerequisites: BIOL 581 Introduction to Bioinformatics. This is the second of two courses on bioinformatics. The topics covered will include: probabilistic methods for sequence modeling, gene expression analysis, protein structure prediction, RNA modeling, whole-genome analysis, and algorithms for exploiting biomedical text sources.