My lecture courses
I am quite involved in teaching in the chemistry curriculum. I am teaching NMR spectroscopy, medicinal chemistry and basic organic chemistry. I have also been teaching protein Biophysics for the Biochemistry Department in the past. These are the following courses:
CHE 439: Advanced Spectroscopy
The NMR course comprises a general overview featuring all basics of NMR such as shift, couplings, relaxation, 2D NMR and solid-state NMR (intro) and the product operator formalism.
The course is intended to give an in-depth introduction into the basics of NMR. The course covers part of the content of our NMR textbook
Oliver Zerbe, Simon Jurt: Applied NMR Spectroscopy for Chemists and Life Scientists, 1st Edition, Wiley-VCH, Weinheim 2013.
You are encourage to purchase the book...
Towards the end of the course I will also introduce assignment strategies for important classes of natural products such as steroids, peptide, nucleic acids etc.
You will find the slides from previous years here:
CHE 172: Organic Chemistry for the Life Sciences (in German)
This is a comprehensive introduction into organic chemistry designed for students of biology and biomedicine here. It is meant to introduce basic concepts in organic chemistry (a bit of introduction to orbitals and bonding, functional groups, classes of organic compounds, reactivity, stereochemistry with (hopefully) many applications in life sciences.
The lecture course builds on a (quite simplified) version of the book of Clayden, Greeves and Warren, Organische Chemie, which all attendants are encourage to read (or even purchase). It is accompanied by a rather elaborate script, and I also provide handouts of my slides. The lecture is additionally recorded.
All material is uploaded on the corresponding OLAT webpage of the course. There is also a forum where you can put questions that I (mostly) answer.
The course is 4 hours per week through the spring semester.
Organic Chemistry for the Students in Medicine and Veterinary Medicine (in German)
This is a course similar to CHE 172 but somewhat shorter (6 weeks a 6 hours). The content is similar but the explanation of mechanistic details is slightly reduced due to the lack of time. In addition, the lecture includes an introduction into analytical methods in chemistry.
Again, all material is uploaded on the corresponding OLAT webpage of the course. There is also a forum and video lecture recordings.
CHE 728: Medicinal Chemistry
A 4-hour/week introduction into medicinal chemistry. The course is intended for chemists and biochemists to provide basic knowledge of medicinal chemistry that is not covered otherwise in the curriculum. Topics include pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, drug design, structural biology of drug receptors, biophyiscal methods for screening, assays.. In addition Dr. Daniel Obrecht teaches combinatorial chemistry and other synthetic aspects and PD Peter Felder provides a very nice introduction into patent law.
What the lecture does not do: It is not a course on how to synthesize drugs. I feel there is sufficient courses in the normal chemistry curriculum to obtain such knowledge. What I rather try to teach is all the rest, that will be required for research in a pharma setting. This is also no course on which drug to take for a given disease, and also primarily does not explain how all classes of drugs function (with the notable exception of antiviral, antibacterial and anti-cancer drugs).
The lecture aims at chemists, biochemists and anyone interested in modern drug development techniques.
The course is 4h/week through the entire semester. It takes place biannual, next date is fall 2021.
BCH 304: Protein Biophysics
This is a very useful lecture taught by Amedeo Caflisch (MD Simulations), Ben Schuler (single-molecule techniques), Ilian Jerezalov (thermodynamics) and previously myself (BioNMR). My part is now covered by Alvar Gossert because I ran out of time to teach it.