Curriculum

Our novel curriculum will include conceptual and technical training, capturing the core concepts, cutting-edge laboratory techniques, modern computational and data analysis methodologies, and critical thinking / experimental design / problem-solving skills to lay the foundation for robust, reproducible synthetic biology research.

Specifically, the SB2 program required coursework consists of three components:

1. Practices & Building Blocks: This coursework component provides introduction into the fundamental cellular processes that synthetic biologists use as building blocks, including signaling, gene regulation and metabolism, as well as wet lab instruction into the modern best practices of genetic and cellular manipulation and measurement, including designing well-controlled experiments.
2. Concepts & RigorThis component will inspire students that bottom-up approaches can reveal new biology and produce biological systems with technological value and offer rigorousdissection and critique into the methods and logic of quantitative/engineering biology efforts. This component also supports experimental design, rigor & reproducibility in science, critical thinking, and hypothesis generation.
3. Computational/Data Analysis:This component will equip students with modern computational tools and methods for analyzing large (genome-scale) datasets and the ability to evaluate new analysis methods introduced by other teams to promote reproducibility in synthetic biology research.

The SB2 technical training integrates into existing programmatic requirements across the three departments, making use of electives and other opportunities and unifying technical training for students. Importantly, the SB2 program requirements do not add additional course credits, but do specify how some of the electives should be used.