This course is an introduction to Catalan for students with no prior knowledge of the language. Through a task-based, communicative approach, this course seeks to initiate students into the elements of reading, writing, listening, and speaking in Catalan.

An introduction to tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

This course covers basic concepts in electromagnetism and light-matter interactions of biomedical significance. Topics covered include: optical properties of biological cells, tissues and biomaterials; visible and near-infrared light absorption, scattering and fluorescence spectroscopy; advanced microscopy techniques, optical coherence tomography, vibrational spectroscopy, photoacoustic imaging, photodynamic therapy and their relevance to human disease diagnostic and therapeutic applications.

This course seeks to build a foundation of physical principles underlying neuroengineering techniques, including electrical, optical, and magnetic approaches to neural recording and stimulation. We will discuss neural recording probes and materials considerations that influence the quality of the signals and longevity of the probes in the brain. This will be accompanied by the discussion of evolution of neural probes from microwires in the 1950s, to Utah arrays in the 1980s, to modern Neuropixels, meshes, and fibers.

An introduction to transport phenomena in biological systems covering fundamental principles of fluid mechanics and mass transfer at the cellular, tissue, and organ levels. Topics include macroscopic and microscopic mathematical descriptions of physiological fluid mechanics in circulation and tissue and mass transport related to convection and diffusion in biological systems; transmembrane and transvascular transport; biochemical interactions; mass separations; and kinetics of biochemical reactions.

This course is offered to junior or senior undergraduate students and graduate students to introduce them to the field of engineered gene therapy. It covers how gene therapy works, the type of vectors used, and why/when certain vectors are employed. The course also includes how to make viral vectors and introduces some non-viral tools for gene therapy.