Pedagogical Program: Pedagogical activities

Chemoinformatics Summer School

The Chemoinformatics Summer School (CS3) is a central piece of the Erasmus Mundus master degree Chemoinformatics+, mandatory for first-year students of the programme, and optional for second-year students. Registration fees are therefore covered for first-year students, whereas second-year students have to fund their participation. It offers advanced lectures from the best worldwide specialists worldwide in the field of ChEMoinformatics.

A sample list of previously invited speakers includes Prof. J.-P. Sauvage, (Nobel chemistry in 2016), Prof. G. Schneider, Prof. J. Bajorath, Prof. A. Cherkasov, Prof. A. Tropsha.

The school proposes lectures in the morning and tutorials in the afternoon. It is a unique occasion to acquire new material and get familiar with cutting-edge technologies from internationally recognized experts of the field. It is an agora of a very diverse community. As observed from past events, attendees population is typically composed of 50% students, 30% academics and 20% industrials; participants come from Japan, Switzerland, Check Republic, Hungary, England, US, Austria, Italy, Norway, Israel, Russia, Brazil, Croatia, Equator, India, the Netherlands, Poland, China.

8th ChemoInformatics Strasbourg Summer School

Remediation period

Since, the first year is performed on 7 sites, the level of training of the students on the various topics will be heterogeneous. The month of September of the second year will be dedicated to a personalized teaching activity to solve this issue.
All students will pass a test to verify the pre-requisites for the lectures of the second year. The remediation teaching unit consists of 24 hours of teaching during which each student discusses with the lecturer(s) of the topics identified as weaker in the student’s profile. To help the students to find the relevant lecturers, all chemoinformatic-related courses of the participating universities will be organized in an ontology. The appreciations of this teaching unit count for 25% in the result of the final defence.

Language courses

In order to facilitate the integration of students from different cultural and social backgrounds into the Erasmus Mundus master degree ChEMinformatics+, part or all of the courses during the first year are proposed in one of the local languages, depending on the track followed (French, Italian, Slovenian, Russian, Ukrainian, Portuguese, Hebrew), and the others in English. Didactic materials and evaluations are provided both in local languages and in English.

The second year, whether in Paris or Strasbourg, will be in English.

Molecular Modelling Project

The teaching for Molecular Modelling using force field or quantum mechanics, starts in the first year at all sites. The evaluation of this competence will include an open science project on each site, performed by the students of first year under the supervision of second year students. These projects will run from January to February. The results of these projects will be presented in a dedicated session of the summer school.

Industrial Project

The consortium share a common Industrial Project, a pedagogical activity to promote entrepreneurship, innovation and open up to civil society. The activity starts at the semester 1 and is validated at the semester 2. The aim of the Industrial project is to help non-academic entities (associations, trusts, industry, department or laboratories of a company, etc.) to innovate by overcoming technical and technological obstacles in the field of chemoinformatics.

The Industrial Project is conducted by a team of 2-3 students from different sites that analyses the problem in detail, writes a letter of engagement, schedules the tasks to be carried out, establishes a functional specification, searches for solution concepts and selects the more appropriate to solve the problem. The activity favors a multidisciplinary approach in relation with the non-academic entity proposing the subject. This activity involves regular communications, meetings and interviews. The project will be conducted between September and May and it is worth 450 to 500 hours with 5 collective work sessions. The work is supervised by a teacher of the consortium and by a professional for management. It is worth 3 additional ECTS.

The assessment of the project is performed through an intermediate educational report, a technical report and an oral presentation. The evaluation is typically oriented towards the organization of work, the division of tasks between the students, data-sharing, productions and how they collectively evaluate their results. The goal is to build a common structure in which every student will contribute and build interpersonal skills.

Hackathon

An open science dedicated hackathon is organized before or after the summer school, typically Saturday and/or Sunday, with distinct registration procedures. At least three Chemoinformatics topics will be proposed to the participants. First, the software programming topic will aim at adding functionalities to an existing open source software projects. Second, documentation consisting to analyse an existing open source project and to improve or complement its documentation. Third, the dataset topic will create high quality datasets through expert data cleaning, involving from bibliographic search up to advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques.

Research project and Organization of the Master thesis

Whatever their specialty, students do their internship in the institution of their choice, European or extra-European, academic or industrial. They can also choose one partner of the consortium that they did not visited before. If they did their first year in their country of residence, the internship must take place in a third country, not yet visited before. The defence of the research project will be organized in Strasbourg. Every consortium memver will send one member of his teaching staff to assist in the defence.

Field courses/Company visits

During the first year, every partner will organize locally a visit to a chemical or a pharmaceutical plant, a software company or any other industrial site, that might become relevant for students’ job integration and to help them to find the right place to prepare their master thesis and contribute to the individual construction of the students’ professional projects.

Communication

The communication skills are developed by a scientific blog activity. The blog will be published in English version to be accessible to all. Each student of the Erasmus Mundus master degree will be invited to contribute at least once each year. It can be a popularization work about a topic on Chemoinformatics, a report about a scientific event, an interview of recognized researcher, etc. The editorial board, managed by the students, is responsible for reviewing, rejecting or accepting the publications before they are released online. However, ultimately, the consortium is always responsible of the published contents and keep the final decision to edit or remove any publication. Technically, the blog will be published on LinkedIn using the existing group Master in Chemoinformatics. Occasionally, articles / abstracts of articles can be published also on the web portal of the Master.