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Master’s program incorporates interdisciplinary concentrations

The LSUS master’s degree offered through the Computer Science Department has been revised to incorporate interdisciplinary concentrations in business administration, biomedical informatics and computer science.

“The aim of this revision,” said Dr. John Sigle, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science, “is to refocus the program to better serve the needs of the community and to better fit the current strengths of the department and the university.” The revision also includes changing the name of the degree with the addition of the word “computer” in Master of Science in Computer Systems Technology.

The revisions were made in cooperation with the College of Business Administration and the departments of Biological Sciences and Mathematics. The degree requires the completion of 30 graduate-level credit hours of course work, including a project or a thesis, and the selection by the student of a concentration area.

The concentration in business administration, which allows a student to gain both the needed technological expertise and the business perspective to work on technical problems within a business environment, requires four graduate business courses and six graduate computer science courses, which includes a 3-hour capstone project course. This concentration will appeal to students who want more technical expertise than an MBA program offers, but who also want a solid background in the problem domain of business.

The concentration in biomedical informatics brings together resources from the Computer Science, Biological Sciences and Mathematics departments. Biomedical informatics is a rapidly developing and exciting multidisciplinary field that addresses the need for researchers and practitioners who have sufficient knowledge and skills to apply the tools and techniques of computing and information technology to solve the problems of medical science. This concentration is a training and research program with a curriculum in step with industrial and academic research wherein computer scientists can acquire sufficient biological expertise and medical professionals, biologists and chemists can acquire programming skills and knowledge of computer science.

The concentration in computer science provides a strong foundation in computer science and computing technologies and provides student with some depth of knowledge in two or more areas within the computing field. The emphasis is on the application of computing to solve real-world problems, but offers more technical depth than the other two concentrations. This concentration serves the needs of students who already have a computer science or computer information systems degree or who have a degree in another field but need technical knowledge in computing.

“Our department has a strong track record of supplying well-qualified graduates – at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels – in the computing field to local, regional and national employers and the demand is growing,” Sigle said.

For information, contact Sigle at John.Sigle@LSUS.edu or 318-797-5093..