About the Department

Welcome to the Department of Basic Sciences and Environment (Institut for Grundvidenskab og Miljø)* within the Faculty of Life Sciences (KU LIFE) of the University of Copenhagen. The Department is responsible for teaching chemistry, mathematics, statistics, computer science, and physics at levels ranging from basic undergraduate courses to advanced ph.d. courses. **

 

Our research includes bioinorganic chemistry, agricultural chemistry, land use and environmental chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry and natural product chemistry, agrohydrology. In the mathematical disciplines, research is conducted in pure and applied mathematics, statistics, and informatics. The primary research effort in physics is in the field of biophysics in the broadest sense. To a great extent, the research projects are of direct relevance to agricultural and veterinary science. An emerging area of interest is bioinformatics: the management and processing of data from molecular biology, such as biosequences, massspectra, etc.

 

The Department takes part in large research projects and research centres within the fields of bioinformatics, image analysis with applications to agriculture and forestry, biotechnology, non-food, dairy & food chemistry, and environmental chemistry. The goal is to achieve a thorough understanding of the physical proporties and the chemistry of biological systems and thus be a part of the development of sustainable models for structure, composition and function af natural systems.

 

Areas of present research are among others: Synthesis, analysis, structure and biological activity of, e.g., peptides, proteins, and secondary metabolites. The function of metals in enzymes. The soil and environmental chemistry of natural plant toxins and added contaminants such as heavy metals, agro chemicals and domestic chemicals. Mathematics applications in biology and population dynamics, especially matrix models. Mathematics applications in agriculture. Harmonic analysis, Lie groups and symmetric spaces. Functional analysis and function theory. Interplay between coordination geometry of zinc andcopper and protein structure in metalloproteins studied by perturbed angularcorrelation of gamma-rays (PAC spectroscopy). Protein aggregation,protein-membrane interactions studied by light, X-ray and neutron scattering. The field of biometry and statistics covers statistical methods and their applications to other fields at KU LIFE, in particular to biological investigations dealing with plants and animals as well as foods and human nutrition. Biological variation is usually substantial, therefore we often apply models with various random effects (the so-called mixed models) to take different sources of variation into account.

 

The department provides extensive consultancy services to other researchers and students at KU LIFE in the fields of statistics, biometry and isotope techniques.

 

 

 

* Previously named: Department of Natural Sciences (Institut for Grundvidenskab).

** With the inclusion on 2008-08-01 of the Agrohydrology group from the Department of Agricultural Sciences, there will be a wider range of course types added later.