Guidelines for Guest Lecturers

On this page, we provide guidelines for the guest lecturers. Of course, feel free to contact us directly for any other question you might have.

A good subject for this class is one that

1. is related to quantitative biology
2. is not already fully covered by an existing review (i.e. has some originality either in scope, timeliness, or ideas)
3. can be reasonably treated in ~1800 words

The presentation serves two main purposes. First, it introduces and reviews the topic in question for all course participants (PhD students of various backgrounds, with an interest in deepening their quantitative skills). Secondly, it gives the writer a structure and main ideas of his/her assignment. Thus, it should be relatively straightforward for the student to come up with the outline of their review manuscript based on the presentation.

Please prepare a bibliography with the references used in your presentation (and possibly further references that might be useful to the student who is assigned your topic).

Ideally, the bibliography should be in bibtex format. Many bibliography managers have an option to export a reference library in bibtex format. For instance, in EndNote, you can select ``Bibtex Export'' as the reference style (edit → output style → output style manager), then select the references to be exported, and use File → Export…

The students have 2 weeks to write their review. During this time, James or I will meet up with them at least twice with them: once after 3 or 4 days to discuss their outline, and once after 10 days to give feedback on their manuscript, prior to submission. That being said, the student might also contact you directly for technical questions, clarifications, etc.

Once the review has been submitted, you and two anonymous students from the course will have a week to provide comments on the manuscript.

The writer will then have a week to revise and correct their manuscript, after which you will get a copy of the “final” version. Depending on its quality and your interest/availability, we will discuss the possibility of putting in more work to publish the review.