2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Chemical engineering graduates are increasingly entering biotechnology fields due to the promise of biotechnology to offer cutting edge and sustainable solutions to world problems as well as its inherent connection to chemical engineering principles. Novel elective courses that teach fundamentals of biotechnology-related fields should complement chemical engineering curriculums and provide perspective and skills that better prepare chemical engineering graduates to pursue industry and academia roles in biotechnology. Synthetic biology is a quickly advancing field where cells are engineered to construct useful biological systems for applications including cell therapeutics, cell factories for biochemical production, and bioremediation. This work introduces a new chemical engineering elective course in synthetic biology that teaches the fundamentals of constructing novel biological systems in a largely experiential learning environment. The course is comprised of one 90-minute lecture period and one 160-minute lab period each week in a dual-functioning bioengineering laboratory classroom. A semester-long case study project of engineering baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to produce a Vitamin precursor chemical is used to simulate an industrial synthetic biology project while applying core concepts covered in the lectures. A broad range of synthetic biology applications are covered in the course content as well as via assessments and through a podcast series where academic and industry representatives are interviewed during class. This synthetic biology course should help others implement similar courses, and the general structure of the course should be beneficial to others wanting to create elective courses in popular chemical engineering-adjacent fields.