Chemical biology is a discipline that studies how chemicals and chemical reactions are involved in biological processes. This discipline has overwhelmingly dominated the Nobel prize in Chemistry in the past four decades, underscoring how biological applications of chemical techniques have changed people’s lives and transformed our understanding of nature.

This course uses a problem-solving approach, in which the students will be given unknown compounds and guided to investigate the biological effects of these compounds. Through this process, the students will learn basic techniques that are commonly used in chemical biology. These include the detection of how chemicals, such as small molecules, lipids, carbohydrates, polypeptides and metals, interact with biological systems as drugs or probes, and the assessment of how the biological systems respond to the chemicals at a mechanistic level.

As an advanced undergraduate course, instead of learning these techniques individually, the students will be taught how to combine these techniques into a project. In addition, the students will experience how chemistry is combined with other fields, such as biochemistry and molecular biology, as a component of a multidisciplinary investigation.  This course is ideal for students who would like to work for the biotech industry upon graduation or to develop a career as a research scientist.