Biological Engineering II: Instrumentation and Measurement
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this junior/senior level course on sensing and measurement techniques for quantitative analysis of molecular, cell, and tissue properties. Topics include light and fluorescence microscopy, electro-mechanical probes such as atomic force microscopy, laser and magnetic traps, and MEMS devices, alongside the statistics, probability, and noise analysis needed to interpret experimental data. The course pairs biochemical and biophysical measurement methods with the engineering tools used to collect them, giving students a working understanding of how quantitative data is generated at the cellular and molecular scale. Materials are drawn from MIT's Biological Engineering curriculum and made available through MIT OpenCourseWare under a Creative Commons license, free to access with no certificate offered. It suits students who already have a foundation in biology or engineering and want to understand the instrumentation behind experimental measurement.