Coursera

Hacking COVID-19 — Course 5: Tracing SARS-CoV-2's Evolution (Coursera)

Offered by University of California, San Diego,

INTROIn this course, you will follow in the footsteps of the bioinformaticians investigating the COVID-19 outbreak by tracing the evolution of SARS-CoV-2. Whether you’re new to the world of computational biology, or you’re a bioinformatics expert seeking to learn about its applications in the COVID-19 pandemic, or somewhere in between, this course is for you! As you go through this journey, we will introduce and explain genomic concepts and give you many opportunities to practice your skills, and we will provide a series of problems with gradually increasing complexity.

Class Deals by MOOC List - Click here and see Coursera's Active Discounts, Deals, and Promo Codes.

This fifth course will discuss the "Italy First" hypothesis of COVID-19 origins, and it will cover bioinformatics methods for rooting and dating a phylogenetic tree inferred from SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences.
This course is part of the Applied Bioinformatics Specialization.

Syllabus

Week 1
In Chapter 7, we will discuss how we can use rooted and dated phylogenetic trees to study the emergence of a virus, with the origins of COVID-19 as our primary inspiration, but with a real case study about HIV transmission as our focus.

Week 2
In Chapter 8, we will perform multiple sequence alignment, phylogenetic inference, tree rooting, and tree dating to investigate the "Italy First" hypothesis of COVID-19 origins.

Go to Class

MOOC List is learner-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Related Courses

Coursera

University of Toronto

Bioinformatic Methods I (Coursera)

Health & Society Statistics & Data Analysis

Large-scale biology projects such as the sequencing of the human genome and gene expression surveys using RNA-seq, microarrays and other technologies have created a wealth of data for biologists. However, the challenge facing scientists is analyzing and even accessing these data to extract useful information pertaining to the system being studied. This course focuses on employing existing bioinformatic resources – mainly web-based programs and databases – to access the wealth of data to answer questions relevant to the average biologist, and is highly hands-on.

Sep 21st 2026

5-12 Weeks

Biology Bioinformatics Molecular Biology

Coursera

The State University of New York

Big Data, Genes, and Medicine (Coursera)

Sci: Biology & Life Sciences Health & Society

This course distills for you expert knowledge and skills mastered by professionals in Health Big Data Science and Bioinformatics. You will learn exciting facts about the human body biology and chemistry, genetics, and medicine that will be intertwined with the science of Big Data and skills to harness the avalanche of data openly available at your fingertips and which we are just starting to make sense of.

Sep 14th 2026

5-12 Weeks

Medicine Health Genetics

Coursera

Johns Hopkins University

Rastreamento de contato da COVID-19 (Coursera)

Health & Society

A crise da COVID-19 criou uma necessidade sem precedentes de rastreamento de contato em todo o país, exigindo que milhares de pessoas aprendessem rapidamente as principais habilidades. As qualificações para os cargos de rastreamento de contato diferem em todo o país e no mundo, com alguns novos cargos abertos a indivíduos com diploma de ensino médio ou equivalente.

Sep 21st 2026

1 Week

Public Health Infectious Diseases Coronavirus

Coursera

Johns Hopkins University

COVID Vaccine Ambassador Training: How to Talk to Parents (Coursera)

Health & Society

Vaccination is a key strategy for preventing serious illness and death from COVID-19. COVID-19 vaccines are available for children 5 and older, but many parents have questions about vaccinations. This training course prepares parents of school-age children, PTAs, community members, and school staff to be Vaccine Ambassadors and promote vaccine acceptance in their communities. **Free enrollment available until December 31, 2022. Valid for one enrollment per person.**

Sep 21st 2026

1 Week

Vaccines Public Health Vaccination

Coursera

University of Florida

COVID-19 - A clinical update (Coursera)

Health & Society

As an expert in infectious diseases, editor of the Journal of Infectious Diseases and author of the textbook Infectious Diseases: A clinical short course, McGraw-Hill April 2020, I have been concerned about the misinformation being shared about the COVID-19 epidemic. How did this disease develop? Where did it come from? How does it cause diseases? The answers to these questions will be answered in the first video of module 1.

Sep 11th 2026

4 Weeks

Health Infectious Diseases Pandemics

Coursera

Xi'an Jiaotong University

Lecture Series for Preventing and Controlling COVID-19 (Coursera)

Health & Society

In December 2019, a cluster of patients with pneumonia of unknown cause appeared in Wuhan, Hubei. Governments at all levels and Department of Health Administration highly valued and rapidly organized the centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), medical institutions, and scientific research academies to conduct a survey, rescue, and collaborative research. This new antigen was quickly identified as a novel coronavirus, named as 2019-nCoV by World Health Organization (WHO).

Sep 28th 2026

3 Weeks

Health Public Health Infectious Diseases

Coursera

University of California, San Diego

Finding Hidden Messages in DNA (Bioinformatics I) (Coursera)

Sci: Biology & Life Sciences Health & Society

This course begins a series of classes illustrating the power of computing in modern biology. Please join us on the frontier of bioinformatics to look for hidden messages in DNA without ever needing to put on a lab coat. In the first half of the course, we investigate DNA replication, and ask the question, where in the genome does DNA replication begin? We will see that we can answer this question for many bacteria using only some straightforward algorithms to look for hidden messages in the genome.

Sep 14th 2026

5-12 Weeks

Biology Algorithms DNA

Coursera

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

Fundamental Skills in Bioinformatics (Coursera)

Statistics & Data Analysis Data Science

The course provides a broad and mainly practical overview of fundamental skills for bioinformatics (and, in general, data analysis). The aim is to support the simultaneous development of quantitative and programming skills for biological and biomedical students with little or no background in programming or quantitative analysis.

Sep 21st 2026

4 Weeks

Programming Bioinformatics RNA Sequencing

Coursera

Institute for the Future

Life After COVID-19: Get Ready for our Post-Pandemic Future (Coursera)

Business

The pandemic will create long-lasting and surprising ripple effects, even after vaccines are widely available. Are you ready for what's next? This course will give you a clear forecast of the challenges and opportunities you’re most likely to encounter over the next 3-5 years, as a direct result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Find out what risks still lie ahead; Make a plan for resilience; Play future forecasting games to stretch your imagination about what's possible; Build your post-pandemic confidence; Envision the world you want to live in when we’re all finally on the other side of COVID-19. How can you take advantage of this unprecedented moment of disruption to make positive change in your community, company or other organization?

Sep 28th 2026

4 Weeks

Resilience Pandemics Positive Change

Coursera

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Big Data Science with the BD2K-LINCS Data Coordination and Integration Center (Coursera)

Health & Society Science

In this course we briefly introduce the DCIC and the various Centers that collect data for LINCS. We then cover metadata and how metadata is linked to ontologies. We then present data processing and normalization methods to clean and harmonize LINCS data. This follow discussions about how data is served as RESTful APIs. Most importantly, the course covers computational methods including: data clustering, gene-set enrichment analysis, interactive data visualization, and supervised learning. Finally, we introduce crowdsourcing/citizen-science projects where students can work together in teams to extract expression signatures from public databases and then query such collections of signatures against LINCS data for predicting small molecules as potential therapeutics.

Sep 21st 2026

5-12 Weeks

Network Analysis Big Data

Coursera

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Managing Supply Chain Disruption During COVID-19 (Coursera)

Management & Leadership Business

In this course, you will learn about why and how supply chains become susceptible to a disruption. We will examine this by discussing supply side and demand side issues, primary supply chain flows, complexity, risk management and a combination of solid theoretical supply chain perspectives and current real-world stories. You will learn about the structural, relational and operational factors that come into play during a supply chain disruption and the mechanisms for the effective management of these factors.

Sep 14th 2026

4 Weeks

Business Management Supply Chain Management Supply Chain

Coursera

Stanford University

AI in Healthcare Capstone (Coursera)

Health & Society

This capstone project takes you on a guided tour exploring all the concepts we have covered in the different classes up till now. We have organized this experience around the journey of a patient who develops some respiratory symptoms and given the concerns around COVID19 seeks care with a primary care provider. We will follow the patient's journey from the lens of the data that are created at each encounter, which will bring us to a unique de-identified dataset created specially for this specialization. The data set spans EHR as well as image data and using this dataset, we will build models that enable risk-stratification decisions for our patient.

Sep 14th 2026

5-12 Weeks

Health Healthcare Patient