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Lifechips Graduate Courses
Lifechips Course Lecture
Achievement/Results
NSF Funded IGERT-Lifechips program at the University of California, Irvine has continued offering the two graduate courses to both the Lifechips students and the general graduate students who find Lifechips interesting or intriguing to find out more about Lifechips. Both of the courses feature lecturers who are Lifechips faculty members as well as UC Irvine faculty in departments like Physics, Chemistry, Biological Sciences, and Engineering.
The first course was called Technology for Life offered in Winter quarter. The course discussed engineering techniques including physics, chemistry, biology, and micro/nano technology for enabling life sciences research in the areas of the major life sciences research efforts: chips for genomics/proteomics, cells, tissues/organs, and biomolecules. Through the course, the students will learn the fundamentals of chip fabrication technology in the context of required biocompatibility, life-chip analysis and design, bio-system engineering in the micro/nano domain, and chip technology requirements for life science discovery.
We were able to recruit outstanding faculty members to lecture for the course and they are: Marc Madou from Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering; Ken Shea from Chemistry; Mark Bachman from Electrical Engineering & Computer Science; Zuzanna Siwy from Physics and Astronomy; Elliot Hui from Biomedical Engineering; Phil Collins from Physics and Astronomy; Abe Lee and his two graduate students Kanaka Hettiarachchi and Jeff Fisher from Biomedical Engineering; Wes Hatfield from Microbiology and Molecular Genetics. Some of the topics were: The importance of fractals in nature and technology, Ionic transport through nanopores: from living cells to diodes and transistors, and Computationally Optimized DNA Assembly.
The second course is titled Technology of Life offered in Spring quarter. This course discusses the complexities of biological problems and the solutions of living systems, illustrating the interplay between the different components of life, such as DND, RNA, proteins, macromolecular complexes, signaling networks, cells, organs, and organ micro/nano engineering will also be covered. The lectures with various topics enable the students to learn the fundamentals of biological systems with an emphasis on their analogues in engineering technology. Additionally, students will be exposed to experimental methods for exploring life systems, system engineering modeling of biology, and applications of life technology to designing life-chips.
We were able to recruit lecturers from both the Lifechips faculty members as well as the UC Irvine faculty. The lecturers include: Eva Lee from Biological Chemistry; Thorsten Ritz from Physics and Astronomy; Yuncai Chen from Pediatrics, Peter Donovan from Biological Chemistry, Edward Nelson from Department of Medicine, Tau-Mu Yi from Developmental and Cell Biology, and John Longhurst from Department of Medicine.
This course is still currently in progress as the quarter has not ended. Both courses use case studies and problem-based learning and a combination of traditional didactic lectures. Students are very involved in the lectures by asking questions along the lectures and their questions help to create an environment for open discussion.
Address Goals
The two courses address discovery as the primary strategic goal and learning as the secondary strategic goal because they offer the students the opportunity to explore the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary visions in various researches. Through lectures, they are not just learning about the current research, but they also gain knowledge of the techniques, equipments and tools that are applied to carry out the research. Also, many lecturers talk about the motivations that pushed them to conduct their research. Such lesson could be very valuable to the students because as grad students they are open to so many ideas and by listening the reasons behind the research; this could innovate them to the next step in their research.
