Professor Kasko's tissue engineering class was not too hard at all. She has two lectures a week and it's only an hour and a half and the friday discussion are up-to-date research papers regarding tissue engineering and the students of the class lead the discussion. She goes over cells, signals, scaffolds, and bioreactors and goes into the broad concept of each one. There is only one midterm and there is a final presentation as well as a take home final (open note/book). There isn't much commitment to the class (no attendance necessary), but I went to all the classes and discussion and got an A. The take home final was not bad at all and the final presentation, I admit, did take a lot of time, effort, and preparation, but overall the class was well presented and is not hard as long as you keep on track. I would highly recommend her class. Btw, she loves cats.

BioE 183 is an upper division elective, most people either take it for an easy A, they like drug delivery, or a combination of both.

Andrea Kasko will not teach you anything useful in this class. This class broadly covers many different drug delivery systems, but does not provide any real information on how to compare them or why they are not used in practice. The class is very superficial and provides no real knowledge a few google searches couldn't answer. The lectures are recorded but are really bad as they have no organization. However, test are only based on lecture so skip the textbook completely. I enjoyed drug delivery and thought I would like this class, but her poor teaching style and bad content made me hate it.

As for the grading. The class has two quizzes (Like midterm and final) 15% each. The quizzes are based on lecture material so make sure and watch and take notes on all lectures, however questions are mini-essay based so you only need to know general concepts of each drug delivery device. There is a group project with multiple presentations and one 8 page paper for a total of 40% of grade. This sucks. Make sure you make friends in class and chose a good group or you will be stuck in a random group with people who do not do anything. She provides little to no direction on how to do the paper so good luck the class is a mess. Also what she teaches is so basic it doesn't help with the paper, you have to teach yourself the modeling part. The paper is a proposal for your own drug delivery device for a specific drug and disease. Lastly the HW and peer reviews are other 30% of grade and are an easy A to boast your points.

My project paper was very bad. The delivery device did not make any sense and could have been much better, however I did well on the quizzes and got an A in the class. It is very important to do well on the two quizzes to get a good grade. Also she never returns the grade on any project/HW only the quizzes, so not sure how I did on other stuff.

Overall did I learn something useful, no. Did I worry about getting a bad grade cause my group paper sucked, yes. Would I take a class with this professor again, absolutely not.

What a waste of time.

Avoid this professor as she is the worst professor in the entire BE department. Class is poorly organized, research is not cool at all. I am wondering how can professor with this level knowledge and class organization skill get her tenure!

Worst professor ever! Materials are more than 10 years lagging the current research. Doesn't really know the cutting edge CRISPR techniques but she still talks about it. Class is poorly organized and no insightful instruction on final projects.

Do not take. There are other BE electives out there with far less work. There was a project(proposal) in this class about drug delivery and the requirements were highly unclear. Additionally, the slides were horrible and did not prepare you for the exams. Just do yourself a favor and take a different elective.

Dr. Kasko runs an interesting class. There is one midterm and one final, plus a group project which runs for the entire quarter and has several components. Your group (3-5 people) gives two initial presentations plus a final presentation as well as a short written report. The group project is essentially theorizing a novel implant or some sort of biomaterial that can be used to solve a current clinical problem. Depending on your group members (you choose your group), this can be a really fascinating project (or really difficult). Lectures are fairly interesting, some days they get boring but I generally liked the material. It starts out with materials science basics, moves into common materials used as implants and their properties/uses, and finishes on the body's reaction to implants. There are no homework assignments to key you in to what she thinks is important, so that made it quite difficult to study for tests but pretty easy/minimal workload when it's not time for a midterm or final.
Basically, if you're interested in the implants side of materials science, this is a great class to take. Nothing is handed to you, so you better have good study skills, but it's quite interesting and I would recommend it.