KTH Master of Science is one of the flagship programmes in Swedish Higher Education. Over the years, numerous CEOs and other business leaders in Swedish and multinational corporations have had this background, as well as a large fraction of engineers in the Swedish telecom and IT industries, pharmaceutical and bio tech industries, manufacturing, aeronautics and space, construction and many other fields.
KTH alumni are also well represented in Swedish Academia, in research outside Sweden, and as entrepreneurs.
KTH's more than 40 MSc programmes in English are a central component in KTH's drive towards an adjustment to the Bologna program of European Higher Education. KTH MSc in Computational and Systems Biology is one of three programmes presently offered by the KTH School of Computer science and Communication.
The modern work-place is project-oriented, both in industry and in academic research. KTH MSc in Computational and Systems Biology will acquire project management skills in addition to their core technical competence, to prepare them for leadership roles in the future. KTH MSc students will further have the opportunity to enhance entrepreneurial skills and build networks through courses and activities at Stockholm School or Entrepreneurship and the KTH School of Industrial Engineering and Management.
Through the genomic revolution, algorithms, bioinformatic tools, data bases and massive data processing and modelling have taken center stage in Biology. With presently envisioned deepsequencing projects (of human and animal populations, and of all organisms in entire ecosystems), present and future organism-wide gene expression and protein data, as well as functional magnetic resonance imaging and other neuroimaging techniques, Biology is set to become the most data-rich and data-intensive of all the Sciences. Joining the endeavour to extend these realms of data, to make sense out of them, and to make them useful for understanding human health and disease are a pathway to an exciting and rewarding professional life.
Academia and industry roadmaps for Computational and Systems Biology are Science's Special Feature on Careers in Systems Biology, Nature's Systems biology: a user's guide, and e.g. Microsoft's BioIT Alliance.
When you have completed your masters degree, you can work as an engineer in a biotech company. It may be a company producing its own line of products or it may be a consultant company which either runs projects for other companies or send you out to other companies. In either case you may either work directly with research and development, or as a project manager. If you graduate from the stream Biotech and Entrepeneurship, you may also be involved in developing a new idea or product, starting up a company, and running a new company. From the stream in Bioinformatics, you will have aquired in depth skills in how to apply cutting edge algorithms to data from e.g. DNA-chips to extract a patterns of gene expression and relate this to states of a disease like Alzheimers. From the stream on Biomodeling you will have the knowledge to set up a biological model as well as to simulate this using state of the art simulation techniques. One example could be to simulate a biochemical reaction network within a cell, including receptors activated by a new pharmacological substance eventually leading to beneficial effects on cell metabolism.