Natalie Kuldell

Natalie Kuldell wants her students to have a lasting and meaningful educational experience that will enable them to formulate and articulate ideas and to apply information. One way to achieve this goal is to engage students in an authentic curriculum. She tries to connect disciplinary content to real world problems and events, to ongoing research efforts, and to future issues as best we can anticipate them. Students engaged in such authentic curricula genuinely care about the outcome of their efforts. Undoubtedly, the current crop of 18-22 year olds will, soon enough, be responsible for understanding and reacting to the good and bad things that present themselves, including engineered biological systems. It’s my hope that their current coursework will be a helpful foundation for thoughtful and informed responses.

In addition to challenging her students with meaningful curricula around biological engineering, Kuldell tries to motivate their learning through positive and responsive connections to them as individuals. Students all have strengths and vulnerabilities. By responding directly to their perspectives, she requires that her students master the course content, think and rethink their ideas, and communicate with clarity and persuasiveness. Assessment tools become teaching tools that not only measure understanding but also further it, and her hope is that no student in my class feels lost, disenfranchised or defeated.

The laboratory subjects in Biological Engineering are cornerstones of the new undergraduate major. Each term Kuldell's has redesigned one of these subjects, to integrate ongoing research interests of her own and of my teaching colleagues. The experimental content is roughly divided into four areas, listed below along with descriptors and links to the investigations themselves. All use biochemical and molecular techniques to study questions from a quantitative engineering perspective.