Students & Alumni speaking
"The course is not only for the brightest students. Motivation and interest are at least equally important."
"I continue to innovate and look for new challenges, but now my focus is on sustainability."
"Physics is a serious academic subject but it also offers a broad intellectual base for other careers."
"The course is not only technical. You also learn many of the fundamental concepts of physics, including quantum physics."
Track Cell Factory
Although humans have long exploited living cells to produce useful products - alcohol, cheese, and bread are examples from the dawn of civilisation - it has only been in the last half century or so that the technologies have existed to control those processes in such a way as to really be able to speak of a 'cell factory'. It is now possible to control and manipulate living cells to harvest a wide variety of substances produced in these 'factories'.
Those substance range from proteins and amino acids to solvents and plastics, with applications of great value not only in commercial and industrial sectors, but also in health care and food production. Cell factories may also present opportunities for sustainable production systems and for the development of new, biodegradable chemical products.
Using cells as production systems
The Cell Factory track focuses on the design, understanding and optimisation of living cells as environmentally and economically sustainable production systems. The track offers courses which provide students with the fundamental knowledge needed to use (microbial) cells and communities for the production of valuable substances ranging from food ingredients to fuels. The embedding of this track in TU Delft's MSc Programme in Life Science and Technology ensures that students joining the Cell Factory track will learn how to integrate and communicate knowledge drawn from fast-changing fields such as systems biology, synthetic biology and community engineering of industrial micro-organisms with the specialist knowledge inherent to bioprocess engineering and biocatalysis.
What you will learn
The programme provides its graduates with both the theoretical underpinnings of cell factories and an understanding of the engineering and industrial requirements for exploiting the enormous potential of the cell as a production system. Graduates will, accordingly, find excellent career opportunities in academia and in industry.
Combining different tracks
This track is part of the MSc programme in Life Science and Technology. The timetable for the programme has been set up to make it possible to follow two (or even three) tracks at the same time. This gives you the possibility to first sample the different flavours, and only later in the first year to definitively choose a particular track.
