Teaching

BIOM 422 Quantitative Systems and Synthetic Biology

Fall 2023

What makes biology different from the inanimate world is that biological systems are the self-assembled networks of biochemical reactions, organized in space and time, which are responsible for cellular and organismal functions and behavior. These biochemical processes usually involve proteins, some of which are intricate complexes whose functioning can only be understood using concepts from the physical sciences. However, the central focus of this course is understanding how these different biological parts, e.g., proteins, nucleic acids etc., come together and orchestrate cellular and organismal functioning, in particular to process information and take decisions. For example, bacterial and mammalian cells undergo chemotaxis, and can detect and move along a gradient of a chemoattractant. But chemotaxis involves a cellular decision based on information processing in order to identify the gradient. How do biological networks process information and how does that information processing lead to a cellular decision is the kind of question that we study. This field is called systems biology.

Our understanding of these processes leads inevitably to the attempt to engineer synthetic systems to control biological organisms, both for basic science as well as for societal needs. This field is called synthetic biology and we will study some of the initial successes of synthetic biology in some detail.

We will also briefly study other topics if time permits. These include understanding cancer as a systems level disease, understanding the basic ideas about how cells and brains process information and how biological systems create patterns in space that give rise to the intricate and often beautiful biological forms that we see around us.

CBE 503 Transport Phenomena Fundamentals

Spring 2022 2024

Transport phenomena is one of the foundational theoretical pillars of chemical engineering science. It is central to almost all natural processes above the molecular scales, and is also fundamentally important in biological organisms. It is of basic importance in chemical engineering processes, but also in other engineering disciplines.

In this first year graduate course course we will give a broad introduction to transport phenomena, with an attempt to cover some of the classical literature as well as some modern methods and applications.