Teaching What We Love: Our first master's course Frontiers in Synthetic Biology is a wrap!
- Lind Lich
- 13 hours ago
- 2 min read
Turns out designing a university course from scratch is a great way to spend your PhD 'free time.' About a month ago we wrapped up our very first Master's course at Freie Universität Berlin, and we're still buzzing about it.
Here's the backstory: the Biology Master's at FU Berlin is great, but something was missing: synthetic biology! So instead of just complaining about it, we decided to build the course ourselves. Enter: "Frontiers in Synthetic Biology."
We packed the syllabus with everything we're excited about in the lab, from big-picture climate science to the nitty-gritty of engineering microbes. Over the course, we covered, among other things: the climate crisis and why it matters, how inventions actually become real-world innovations, quick-and-dirty back of the envelope calculations, the economics and environmental footprint of food and fuel, why microbial-based foods might be a bigger deal than people think, CO₂ fixation in all its facets: natural, synthetic, biological, electrochemical. Growth-coupled bioproduction and engineering sensor strains, handy online tools for getting to know your proteins, and a crash course in the skills you need for metabolomics, proteomics, and genomics.
We also had students pick a paper and present it to the class, a classic but genuinely great way to really dig into scientific literature. And when we opened the floor for students to pitch their own theoretical projects, the ideas that came back blew us away.
Honestly, the best part was just watching everyone get into it. The questions, the creativity, the genuinely clever metabolic engineering ideas. Teaching what we love, and getting to talk about our own research while doing it, made this even more fun than we expected.
And of course, we closed out the first-ever "Frontiers in Synthetic Biology" the only way that felt right: a big barbecue party with everyone that made this course a wonderful and fun success!
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