Bioengineering

Program Offerings

Offering type
Minor

Bioengineering will play increasingly important roles in health, technology, and society in the 21st century. These efforts are already underway, with bioengineers helping to usher in next generation vaccines (e.g. mRNA vaccines introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic) and therapeutics (e.g., the first CRISPR gene therapies just approved in December 2023), and to find new sources of renewable energy (e.g., metabolic engineering to produce biofuels), among myriad other applications for human health and society. There is a pressing need to train the next generation of bioengineers and a high degree of enthusiasm among Princeton undergraduates to have more training opportunities in this emerging field. Drawing on Princeton’s strengths in bioengineering, both within the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute (ODBI) and across the broader campus, the bioengineering minor will provide rigorous classroom and research experiences, enabling our students to gain expertise and make important contributions to this critically important field.

Goals for Student Learning

Learning goals of the bioengineering minor include the following:

  1. Students will gain knowledge of bioengineering approaches, including protein design, principles of cell and tissue engineering, computation and device fabrication.
  2. Students will develop research skills and mastery of cutting-edge analytical and experimental approaches as part of their senior independent research, senior thesis or full-time summer research experience.
  3. Students will develop relationships with classmates across disciplines, interacting with both engineering and life science peers to solve cutting-edge problems. These relationships will be fostered both in the classroom and in research opportunities such as the Bioengineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program and the iGEM Program, an undergraduate team-led synthetic biology research program that has attracted students from MOL, ELE, CBE and MAE, among other programs.
  4. Students will be exposed to and consider ethical dimensions of bioengineering and its impact on society. In addition to expanding opportunities for ethical reflection in new undergraduate coursework being developed by ODBI faculty, students pursuing the bioengineering minor will be required to attend the annual Omenn-Darling Bioethics lecture and participate in associated activities including a discussion with the speaker. 

Prerequisites

Students wishing to declare a Minor in Bioengineering must have taken a foundational course in Molecular Biology (MOL214 or equivalent) as well as one foundational course in computing (COS126 or equivalent).

Program of Study

  • Three courses with bioengineering content, selected from an approved list. These courses should provide a coherent training in an area of bioengineering, such as biotechnology, molecular or cellular engineering, neuroengineering or systems biology. One of these courses must be from outside the student’s department of concentration, and at least one of these courses must not count as a departmental. 

  • One advanced life science course, selected from the approved list. This course should provide additional insight into complex living systems and complement the bioengineering courses chosen by the student. Please note: Up to 2 courses can be double-counted with a student’s major.

  • To promote thinking about the ethical aspects of bioengineering and its effects on society, students are required to attend the Omenn-Darling Bioethics Lecture and participate in related activities, such as a discussion with the speaker. 

  • Close collaboration with faculty is expected. Students are required to complete at least one semester or summer of bioengineering research in an appropriate area of engineering biology. This research requirement can be a component of the student's senior thesis or senior independent research, or be satisfied by either of the two bioengineering summer research programs recently established at Princeton (Bioengineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program; iGEM program).

Additional Requirements

Program students are expected to demonstrate strong academic performance. To qualify for the bioengineering minor upon graduation, a minimum grade average of B- in the program courses is required. Program courses may not be taken on a pass/D/fail basis. 

Faculty

For a full list of faculty members and fellows please visit the department or program website.

Courses

CBE 438 - Biomolecular Engineering (also BNG 438/MOL 438) Not offered this year

This course will focus on the design and engineering of biomacromolecules. After a brief review of protein and nucleic acid chemistry and structure, we will delve into rational, evolutionary, and computational methods for the design of these molecules. Specific topics to be covered include aptamers, protein and RNA-based switches and sensors, unnatural amino acids and nucleotides, enzyme engineering, and the integration of these parts via synthetic biology efforts. Two lectures. J. Conway

MOL 415 - Modern Biophysics and Systems Biology (also BNG 415) Fall

At 10 nanometer scale, protein machines 'walk' on microtubule tracks. At a scale 10,000 times larger, sheets of cells self-organize to form ornate shapes that can even heal themselves after injury. This course will examine these and other complex biological systems at the molecular, cellular, and tissue scales. In parallel, we will cover the current and emerging methods that enable us to quantitatively probe and analyze biological systems. Specific topics will include structural biology from crystallography to cryo-electron microscopy, enzyme kinetics and networks, next-gen sequencing and data mining, modern microscopy and image analysis. Staff