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Session 2251

Environmental Engineering Design in Biological Process Engineering

Arthur T. Johnson Biological Resources Engineering/University of Maryland

The Biological Resources Engineering Program at the University of Maryland educates students in the application of engineering to biological systems. The intention of the undergraduate program is to provide a broad and fundamental curriculum with a strong dose of biological sciences in addition to the required engineering science and design 1,2. The program is ABET accredited.

After taking courses in general biology, organic and biochemistry, microbiology, and cell physiology, students may choose three biological science technical elective courses from among a list of hundreds of available courses. Depending on the student's interest, she may choose courses in air pollution, food chemistry, genetics, or kinesiology, for example.

This program is new, only two years old, and the total number of undergraduate students is approximately seventy-five. We anticipate the steady-state undergraduate enrollment to be twice the present number. Although we avoid requiring undergraduate students to choose their ultimate area of specialization, roughly half are interested in environmental engineering, forty percent are interested in medicine or biomedical engineering, and about ten percent are interested in a range of specialties including aquacultural engineering, agricultural engineering, microbial systems, and others.

Two of the major challenges to be met in this program are: 1) to provide a set of courses of sufficient utility to the range of student interests that they will be a useful foundation upon which to specialize further after graduation, either through graduate education or through on-the-job training, and 2) to make each required course contain something of interest to each and every student, no matter what his occupational specialty goal. The first of these challenges has required study, vision, and the establishment of a new set of courses rarely, if at all, seen in somewhat similar curricula. Included in this set are courses such as Biological Response to Environmental Stimuli (a black-box approach to biological input-output relationships), and Control Systems for Biological Engineers (a survey course on control strategies working with or within biological systems).

Technical material for the Biological Process Engineering course is based on the three transport

1996 ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings

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Johnson, A. T. (1996, June), Environmental Engineering Design In Biological Process Engineering Paper presented at 1996 Annual Conference, Washington, District of Columbia. 10.18260/1-2--6037