A New Framework for Teaching Synthetic Biology

Researchers at the Center for Synthetic Biology at Northwestern Univ. come from a variety of fields: chemical engineering, computer science, genetics, biology, and more. So do their students. But a new educational framework is providing common ground.

In a course about to launch its fifth year on campus, synthetic biology instructors teach the subject organized by scales, from the molecular to the societal. Its developers are now hoping to spread the word.

“In a very natural way, it forces people to think holistically,” says Julius Lucks, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern who helped develop the course. It’s easy for education to inadvertently silo students into one scale or another — perhaps they know a lot about protein folding, or gene transcription, or the societal impacts of new biotechnologies, Lucks adds, but the new curriculum helps them identify gaps where they need to understand more.

The Center for Synthetic Biology opened in 2016 and has brought many graduate students and researchers to campus. Students often don’t “talk the same synthetic bio language” coming into the program, says Lucks, as their undergraduate majors are so diverse. Lucks and his colleagues wanted to develop a strong introduction to the field. They secured funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation to develop an educational curriculum geared toward undergraduate upperclassmen and first-year graduate students.

The “ah-ha moment,” Lucks says, came when researchers hit upon the idea of thinking about the scales of synthetic biology. Much...