Bringing Biology to Freshmen Engineering Students: The Approach Implemented at Notre Dame

Abstract

The growing relevance of biology to diverse engineering problems has led to the suggestion that training in biological sciences should be incorporated into the core engineering curriculum. While there is growing interest in this idea, challenges to including biology in the engineering curriculum include fitting this new material into an already crowded schedule (i.e., deciding what other core topics to cut), determining what biological topics should be covered, and agreeing upon which part of the university should teach the course. This “methods” article describes Notre Dame’s approach to solving these problems, in which the second semester of general chemistry has been replaced by a semester of “biological chemistry” that is designed specifically to bring key concepts of biology to the first year engineering students while also teaching some core aspects of typical second semester chemistry. This course is now approaching its 10th year, and it has expanded to include not only all first year engineering students, but also a sizable fraction of physics and mathematics majors. We discuss some of the challenges that we faced in designing and implementing the course, and provide both a summary of the present curriculum and pointers about how to make the course run smoothly. We suggest that our approach be considered as a general solution to the problem of how to introduce biology to students in engineering as well as in mathematics and the physical sciences.