20.400/7.548  Perspectives in Biological Engineering

This subject is aimed toward enabling students to fuse engineering and biological approaches to address problems and opportunities in basic science and technology, emphasizing a quantitative, systems-oriented perspective. The central theme of this offering will be relevance of a biological engineering perspective to issues in cancer biology especially the methods and approaches for studying cancer at the molecular, cellular, tissue, and organ levels of complexity.

Class periods revolve around discussion of primary journal articles (with review articles provided for background information) describing important contributions from biology, physical/chemical sciences, computation, and engineering, across the hierarchy from gene expression to protein regulatory networks to cell functions to tissue pathophysiology. The text Cancer Biology by R.A. Weinberg (Garland), will serve as a useful foundation.

A term project undertaken in paired teams will include written and oral presentation of an original proposal on a biological engineering issue of the students’ choice, requiring combination of both engineering and biological methodologies and approaches. The term grade will derive from the written paper and oral presentations along with participation in class-period discussions.

Enrollment in this subject is limited.