Computational Bioengineering

Preface

The book evolved from the lecture notes of the course Computational Bioengineering held at ENS Paris-Saclay (2025) and at TU Wien (2026). When designing the course we took inspirations from several other courses, most notably, the course by Michael Elowitz and Justin Bois.

Bioengineering is the systematic engineering of biological entities - designing genetic circuits, engineering cells for medicine and industry, optimizing bioproduction. It is an increasingly interdisciplinary field where advances come from biology, computer science, circuit design, control theory, and more.

In this course you will learn how computational techniques drive progress in bioengineering. Topics include modeling and simulation of cellular processes, distributed algorithms for biological systems, design of genetic circuits and digital logic in cells, RNA/DNA engineering, and computational approaches to measurement. A concrete running example throughout is the design of an inverter in a bacterial cell.

We are always looking forward for feedback.

Running the notebooks

To run the notebooks locally, clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/BioDisCo/computational_bioengineering_tuwien2026.git

License

Course materials includes original material from Matthias Függer and Thomas Nowak and adapted content from Michael Elowitz and Justin Bois. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.