Model Building for Life Sciences in the Two-Semester Introductory Physics Course

Building mathematical models for living systems has enabled novel insights into our understanding of biology. This is one of the major shifts of modern science, yet for most biology undergraduates, there is little opportunity in the standard curriculum to develop the skills for model building. We have adapted the year-long calculus-based course to address this gap by teaching fundamental, mostly two-body interaction models of the traditional physics curriculum to students, while extending the usual problems solved in the University Physics course to apply to biological systems. Much attention has been paid to biological relevance and to defining how much biology a successful instructor should know, but we have found that the most important aspect of student success (defined by confidence to use physics to build models for living systems) is to carefully scaffold problems to allow the physics being taught to meet the biology. As mentioned, biological relevance is essential for making this real, but an encyclopedic knowledge of biology is not important here. Where we have found success is to stick to a modest selection of biological ideas, that can be revisited and layered upwards with additional physical concepts rather than increasingly diverse of sophisticed biological ideas. I will outine the comfortable-and-familiar-to-us core of physical concepts that we have used to build models. And I will present a few examples of macroscopic and microscopic biological systems that recur throughout the year-long course, and will discuss some of the important mathematical tripping points faced by our beginning students. I will also discuss briefly how we have developed resources and made them available to the colleagues for use in their courses.