2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Like many other professors, I have received an excess of requests from undergraduate students looking for research opportunities, but I am limited by the amount of time and resources available to me. I have also attended advisory board meetings in which the members have stressed the importance of giving students hands-on research or lab experience with practical methods to prepare them for the workforce. I sought to address both of these issues by developing a novel course that combines the structured elements of a traditional lecture course with the independence of a research projects to give a class of up to 20 undergraduate students a meaningful and practical learning experience within a single semester. The desired outcome of this course is a well-trained and semi-independent group of undergraduate researchers with an appreciation of experimental design, specific laboratory methods, and data analysis. The achievement of this outcome was measured via both traditional student surveys and data from real experiments in which the students were able to successfully address real-world problems.
The new course, entitled “Gene Therapy Research & Methods”, is a novel and interdisciplinary hybrid lecture + lab course that is designed to give undergraduate students hands-on experience with cutting edge molecular biology and cell culture techniques. The weekly lectures focus on the gene delivery methods that are used for gene and cell therapies in the clinic, while the lab periods challenge the students to develop strategies to improve non-viral gene delivery.
This paper will describe the content developed and lessons learned over the four offerings of this course from the past 6 years. For example, the experiments conducted in the course each year have ranged from using RNA interference or Cas9 to inhibit host cell proteins that inhibit gene delivery to engineering the sequence of a promoter to optimize transcription and prevent epigenetic silencing. In either case, students are allowed to select their own targets for inhibition or design their own sequences, which provides them with the opportunity to be creative, analyze recent literature, and formulate their own hypotheses (instead of performing routine experiments in a lab manual). Furthermore, mastery of each experiment is a core tenet of this course. If an experiment fails, the students are required to repeat it until it works before they move on to the next experiment, thereby lending a degree of credibility to the claim that this course is a genuine semi-independent research experience. The probability of the students’ success in each experiment is bolstered by a suite of training videos and quizzes that the students must complete before attempting the experiment. I am available to help the students during each scheduled lab session, but I do not guide them through the individual steps of each experiment in a synchronized fashion.
The complete paper will include the results of student surveys and comments. The paper will also include actual data that show the groups were able to design minimal promoter sequences that achieved transfection efficiencies and transgene expression levels comparable to commonly used promoters.