Course Philosophy: The transformation of numerous discoveries in life sciences into technology in the past two decades has impacted our society tremendously. Key to this transformation are the quantitative analysis of many descriptive findings, synthesis of knowledge from different disciplines and conversion of various practices into robust processes. This course is designed to endow students from life sciences and allied engineering disciplines with those skills for research and development of biotechnological products. The course will entail engineering fundamentals of biological processes, from upstream production to downstream recovery, with an emphasis on establishing the spontaneity of approaching biological problems quantitatively. The presentation of engineering fundamentals is interjected with a survey of biotechnological products and their production processes. The planned topics are listed in the course schedule.
Prerequisites and course requirements: This course is for senior undergraduate students and graduate students in life science and in chemical engineering, bioengineering. Students are expected to have had biochemistry or microbiology or cell biology. They should also have had one year of calculus. Although the course will deal with primarily steady state conditions, the students will be expected to have the concept of differential equations, or to quickly grasp those concepts at the beginning of the course. Most homework will be calculations. The design project will be team work of small groups, involving collection and synthesis of key information, and assembly into a professional presentation and a report. Lecture notes and assigned readings will be available on the course website. Students are expected to bring the lecture notes to the class to facilitate note taking. The lectures, most discussion, final presentation and report will be in English.
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