Core Courses

Students in PGSS take core courses in biological sciences, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, and phsycis. These lecture-style classes are taught by Pittsburgh-area professors and industry experts and cover content typically found in first-year undergradaute courses. 

Lectures are 50-minutes long and each subject meets 4 times a week. Students are expected to attend all their classes and complete one homework assignment a week for each of the five core coures. 

2024 Course Descriptions

Basic Science to Modern Medicine: The Biology of Cancer, Stem Cells, and Genome Editing with Applications to 21st Century Therapeutics | The goal of this course is to take students beyond the basics of cell biology, molecular biology, and genetics that they have learned in high school courses. Students will apply their existing knowledge to gain a deeper understanding of multicellular systems with an emphasis on stem cell biology and cancer cell biology. Students will learn how the dysfunction of cancer cells and the remarkable potential of stem cells are fundamentally connected to the same processes that drive the normal development of a new organism from fertilization to adult. In addition, we will discuss recent advances in cancer treatment including immunotherapies and examine the state of stem cell therapies for treatments of diseases like Multiple Sclerosis and Sickle Cell Anemia. While our genetic makeup plays critical roles in human health and disease, novel technologies like CRISPR are enabling the unprecedented ability to modify our genomes to cure diseases. We will discuss how these approaches work and their implications for modern medicine. This course will require students to synthesize a wide range of information from a diversity of different fields in biology. We will focus not only on what we know, but how we know it, delving into the essential experimental techniques that drive scientific discovery. We will approach these topics primarily through lectures and team-based problem solving and use a variety of resources ranging from articles in the mainstream media like the New York Times to those in the scientific literature from journals like Science. Students will leave the course knowing more about biology and appreciating how much more remains to be discovered.

Fundamentals of Organic Chemistry | Organic Chemistry is very much a part of our everyday life and activities. Introductory organic chemistry course presents structure, reactivity, mechanisms, and synthesis of organic compounds. This course builds on by introducing students to additional functional groups, chemical reaction mechanisms and synthetic strategies commonly used in the practice of organic chemistry. Advanced topics to be presented will include techniques like Infrared (IR) and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. Students taking this will be exposed to topics presented in greater depth and broader context, with applications to allied fields such as (1) polymer and materials science, (2) environmental science and (3) biological sciences and medicine.

Programming Languages and Engineering Tradeoffs | Programming is how most people are introduced to the broader world of computer science, but often it feels like there’s very little “science” going on. Instead, we get procedures, rules, cryptic commands to memorize and apply. Throughout this course we’re going to unmask the magic behind programming and programming languages. We’ll be building our own mini- programming language, and using it to understand how computer science, both in industry and academic settings, is often a study of empirically balancing competing priorities. We’ll get a good mix of hands-on-keyboard work building our language, understanding of core theoretical concepts in computer science, and a dash of the history, ethics, and politics of programming languages for spice and context. Some of the topics we’ll be exploring:

• Types of Programming Languages
• Translating Human Languages into Machine Languages
• Compilation (parsing, lexing, code generation)
• Compiled vs Interpreted Languages
• Language Runtimes, Virtual Machines, and Native Compilation
• Types and Introductory Type Theory
• Computability and the Theory of Computation
• Engineering and Tradeoffs
• Human Centered Design

Discrete Mathematics | For many years, calculus was the first mathematics course taken by science and engineering majors. But since the birth of the digital era a second area, discrete mathematics, has come into equal partnership in this foundational role. Its subject matter is not so much new as it is newly organized and newly recognized for its ever-increasing applicability.

Graph theory and combinatorics, once exotic electives in the curriculum, are now requirements in many programs. Indeed, there are those who would start mathematics degree programs with a study of discrete mathematics rather than the traditional calculus. We will consider topics drawn from elementary combinatorics, modular arithmetic, recursion, and graph theory. We will also consider infinite sets for the exposure to additional methods of proof, and because the introduction of set theory to mathematics was a very significant moment in its development. Notes will be furnished on topics such as the following:

• Combinations and permutations and their applications
• Recurrence relations
• The principle of mathematical induction
• Graph theory
• Fibonacci numbers
• Modular arithmetic
• Combinatorial proof
• Cantor's theorems on infinite sets

Concepts of Modern Physics | Our intuition of the world is based on our everyday experience of it. When we judge whether an idea seems reasonable or not, we are usually unconsciously comparing it with how well it matches this everyday intuition. But when we try to extrapolate to vast or to tiny distances, or to very high speeds, very often this intuition fails us. There are properties of the physical world that can remain hidden from us until we have the means to observe nature more finely.

This course introduces the special theory of relativity. Much that at first might appear strange and unintuitive in this theory only seems so because a simple extrapolation of the mechanical laws of nature fails at speeds close to the speed at which light travels. However there is really nothing at all strange about special relativity. It follows a logical set of rules, and everything in it is sensible and consistent. There are no paradoxes or inconsistencies as long as we view things in the right way. As this theory becomes more and more familiar to you, it will no longer seem so strange at all. In time it will become for you a part of a broader and truer intuition of the natural world.