Teaching
During the years 1980-1988 as a Professor of Physics at the Technical University of Munich Klaus Schulten taught all theoretical physics undergraduate and graduate courses, which were offered at the Technical University, i.e., classical mechanics, classical electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, advanced quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics. During these years he developed jointly with his colleague Erich Sackmann a series of courses in biophysics that laid the foundation of the Munich school in biophysics. He regularly taught three courses: molecular biophysics, biology of self-organizing systems, and neurophysics.
While teaching at the Technical University of Munich Klaus Schulten developed a course and a student laboratory in computational physics and computational biology. He installed a pool of Unix workstations that served the students for their projects, their homework, and their instruction during their third and fourth year of study. The success of the pool was based on strenuous efforts in developing software that provided an excellent user interface as well as fully functioning programs for each project, and permitted students to experiment easily on their own. The teaching was based on a formal lecture course in the first term and a student project seminar in the second.
The biophysics courses mentioned above were written up in notes that were widely circulated. The first course provided the basics in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, illustrated through case studies in molecular biology such as polymer folding, the glycolytic pathway, enzyme kinetics, chemiosmotic potential, and photosynthesis. The second course taught the mathematics of non-linear kinetics and emergent systems, with examples like oscillating reactions, metabolic pathways, morphogenetic fields, slime mold amoebae, and molecular evolution. The third course combined the biophysics of single neurons via the cable and Hogkin-Huxley equations with the then emerging theories of neural networks, a field to which Schulten contributed through his research.
In 1988 Schulten moved to the physics department and the Beckman Institute of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In Urbana his teaching in physics first involved mainly quantum physics, a required one-year course for both undergraduate physics majors and graduate students. He developed this course around electronic media, making an extensive set of beautifully typeset lecture notes, problem sets and solutions available on the Schulten group's web site. He pioneered, in particular, the combination of computing and mathematical methods in teaching, making a new generation of physics students thoroughly familiar with the intelligent use of the computer. Over one third of students' problem sets eventually involved the use of computational methods. The success of the approach was based again on a great effort in developing software, detailed solutions, and solved examples.
Schulten's undergraduate and graduate teaching in biophysics in Urbana focused on laboratory projects, as well as neurophysics, molecular biophysics, and theoretical biophysics courses. Through his world-leading laboratory in computational biology he attracted a constant stream of undergraduates, many through an annual competition for NSF Research Experience for Undergraduate projects, as well as graduate students.
Schulten devotes a large fraction of his efforts to teaching physical and computational methods for the life sciences. He has written, together with two of his former graduate students (now full Professors in Germany) a textbook on theoretical neurobiology; presently, he is completing a textbook on non-equilibrium statistical mechanics with a strong focus on biological systems (preliminary text). He organized a campus-wide course, Biological Physics, that bridged the physical and life sciences. The course, jointly taught by physical and life scientists, attracted a large, enthusiastic audience and covered subjects ranging from bacterial motion to vision. Since 2001 he has written a monthly Research Highlights column that explains in layman's terms discoveries made in Biological Physics and Computational Biophysics. Best known is his series of hands-on workshops in Computational Biophysics (listed here) that have given hundreds of students, postdocs, and faculty an opportunity to learn in 1-2 week courses that combine introductory lectures with extensive computer laboratory sessions an opportunity to learn physical modeling of cellular systems in a practical manner. For this purpose he developed jointly with his graduate students a comprehensive series of tutorials that permit hands-on learning through self-study. All lectures, tutorials, case studies, along with evaluations by participants are available on the web.