Are you interested in engineering cells to make biofuels, build materials, detect toxins, or kill tumors? Synthetic biology is the subject of engineering cells delivering designer mRNAs and proteins that execute new functions or alter cell's behavior. This course serves as a rigorous introduction to research in synthetic biology. Students will read research papers in the field, learn modern techniques in gene synthesis, sequencing and molecular cloning, and develop and present research proposals in synthetic biology.

This course introduces the concepts of soft condensed matter and their use in understanding the mechanical properties, dynamic behavior, and self-assembly of living biological materials. We will take an engineering approach that emphasizes the application of fundamental physical concepts to a diverse set of problems taken from the literature, including mechanical properties of biopolymers and the cytoskeleton, directed and random molecular motion within cells, aggregation and collective movement of cells, and phase transitions and critical behavior in the self-assembly of lipid membranes and intracellular structures.

This course will focus on the structure, function, design and engineering of biomacromolecules and their use in modern biotechnologies. After a brief review of protein and nucleic acid chemistry and structure, we will delve into rational, evolutionary, and computational methods for the design and engineering of these biomolecules. Then we will review applications in the primary literature including: protein and RNA-based switches and sensors, unnatural amino acids and nucleotides, enzyme engineering, integration of these parts via synthetic biology, and metabolic engineering.

Over the next several decades environmental sustainability will be a major challenge for engineers and society to overcome. This course is an introduction to environmental biotechnology focusing on how the applications of biotechnologies are impacting sustainability efforts in a variety of sectors including water systems, food and chemical production, and infrastructure construction. This course will provide a broad background in biological design concepts across scales from molecules to ecosystems, how bioengineering enables the design of new biotechnologies, and the ethical implications of engineering biology for use in the environment.

Bioelectronics plays an increasingly vital role in fundamental research, therapeutics, and everyday life. This course will explore the basic principles of bioelectronics and their applications in biomedicine. The first part of the course will cover the fundamentals of bioelectricity, different types of biosensors, and related signal processing. The second part of the course will introduce the interface between bioelectronics and biological systems and the applications of bioelectronics devices in neuroscience, cardiology, tissue engineering, and wearable technologies.