Research in the life sciences is increasingly interdisciplinary, drawing on tools and techniques from the physical sciences, mathematics, and engineering. Traditional divisions between biomedical and physical sciences are eroding as more biological researchers are counting single molecules, detecting single photons, and probing dynamics within individual cells.  Physical and biological scientists need to understand  how physical and mathematical tools and techniques impact current research in biology.  This project aims to improve interdisciplinary training in physics and biology by integrating four new experiments in biological physics into an existing physics advanced undergraduate laboratory. The new, inquiry-based experiments take a quantitative and explicitly physical approach to fundamentally important biological phenomena at the molecular, cellular, and single-photon level.The new experiments include an optical trapping experiment (laser tweezer) in which students measure the flagellar force and rotation frequency of swimming bacteria; a Brownian motion experiment that explores random walks and the dimension of randomly coiled DNA; a fluorescence correlation spectroscopy experiment in which students use photon statistics to measure diffusion and interactions of biomacromolecules; and an electrophoresis study that provides insight into DNA dynamics and configurational energies.One goal of developing such experiments for the advanced physics laboratory is to make biological physics accessible to a wider range of physics departments. An advanced laboratory is one mechanism by which a department can offer students participation in a research-like biological physics activity, even if that department has few if any biological physicists on the faculty.We will present an overview of the experiments and the preliminary findings from evaluation of this project -- which includes student SALG surveys and interviews, as well as feedback from faculty at other institutions who have engaged in our ALPhA summer laboratory immersion. The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the NSF (DUE award 1139906) for this project.

Integrating biological physics into the undergraduate advanced laboratory

246th National Meeting (2013)

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