Synthetic biology is the process of engineering, or synthesizing, useful biological entities (e.g., genetic circuits, cells, etc.) from bottom-up knowledge of the individual parts.  EECS has a central role in this endeavour, interacting from several viewpoints. First, we teach powerful approaches to analyze complicated systems (e.g., circuits, computers, software), and these approaches are readily applied to biological systems. Second, we have repeatedly created complicated systems by standardizing and then combining their elementary components (e.g., logic gates, lumped-element circuits).  We are repeating this process now with biological components.