For the past ten years, biology has been one of the most popular majors at Davidson College. Students conduct research on campus during the school year and over the summer months. Many students are accepted to summer research positions around the country, ranging from bench work at Caltech, to field studies at Glacier National Park, or bioethics work at the National Institutes of Health. Biology majors have been awarded prestigious national and international awards such as NSF Graduate Fellowships, Goldwater Scholarships, Watson Fellowships, and Fulbright Scholarships. About two-thirds of biology graduates will attend professional (medical and allied health) or graduate school, while the remaining graduates will pursue career tracks that vary according to their personal interests. Examples of graduate and medical schools that biology alumni have attended recently include Harvard, Stanford, Washington University, Johns Hopkins, Yale, Princeton, University of Chicago, and Duke as well as many regional and state schools. Students are often accepted to multiple schools and get to select where they want to attend. Many young alumni explore career interests or travel to distant places for one to three years after Davidson before deciding to attend graduate or professional schools.
The Biology Department is composed of seven staff members and thirteen full time faculty who share a dedication to undergraduate education where learning, exploring, and scholarship are blended with mentoring, research, and friendships. Staff members safely maintain animals, equipment, and chemicals, laboratories. No class is larger than 32 students, including our introductory courses. Labs are capped at 16 students with individual faculty members teaching both the lab and lecture sections for a single course. Faculty enjoy getting to know our students personally, including those who major in other disciplines. Upper level classes can range from 32 students in lecture courses, 12 students in seminar courses, 6 students in group investigation research courses, or 1-5 students in independent research. All research is centered on undergraduates learning and performing science since Davidson has no graduate students. Many faculty collaborate with other departments, most often in the sciences. Faculty and their student collaborators are well funded with research grants (including three NSF CAREER Grants), they co-authors paper, and present their research at scientific meetings.
Student-built
optical tweezers used in biophysics.
Mouse over image to see light pathways (red = laser; green = reflected).
The Biology Department is housed in the adjoining Watson Life Sciences and the Dana Science Buildings. The facilities include well-equipped teaching and research laboratories, a large state-of-the-art lecture hall, cell culture facilities, microscopy facilities, and an animal care facility with an aviary. All instructional laboratories are equipped with networked computer stations for every two students, an instructor's computer with video projection units. Faculty offices are located near their research and teaching laboratories to facilitate student-faculty interactions.
Students and faculty have access to major equipment funded by external grants and College funding. Students can use a laser-scanning confocal microscope, DNA microarray printing and scanning systems, real time PCR , 96-well fluorometer, epifluorescence microscopes with digital cameras and time-lapse imaging, stereographic 3D viewing goggles for visualizing structures, dual-head dissecting microscopes, microinjection, micromanipulators, and cryostat. In addition, common equipment includes PCR machines, spectrophotometers, DNA/RNA/protein gel and blotting apparati, gel and blot imaging system, two web servers (one for student programming), -80 freezers, high-speed and ultra centrifuges, bench-top microfuges, etc.
Click here to see a movie of a reconstructed developing
fish heart. (14MB file)
Biology students use the College's ecological preserve to conduct field research. The 220 acre preserve is adjacent to the main campus and the site of many semester-long or multi-year projects. GPS and GIS positioning software and equipment allows students to locate geographical positions and produce images territories or ranges. For botanical studies, a green house is available to grow plants under controlled conditions. Alternatively, six growth cambers are available all year inside Dana and Watson buildings for plant and animal physiology experiments. Multi-year seed bank and behavior ecology research projects provide longitudinal perspectives and short-term projects are available as well.
The College owns two off-campus field sites, Morgan's Bluff, and Glen Alpine Springs in the nearby foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.
Biology faculty members focus on teaching but write grants to fund student research and teaching innovations. Both private and governmental funds have enabled our biologists to purchase major equipment, supplies and pay summer stipends for students. Funding sources include: National Science Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Keck Foundation, Pew Foundation, North Carolina Biotechnology Center, Duke Energy Environmental Center, Waksman Microbiology Foundation, National Human Genome Research Institute, Merck/American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Whitehall Foundation. Since 2000, faculty members have garnered over four million dollars in extramural funding. Many grants include funds to hire undergraduates as summer research collaborators; 35 undergraduates will be working with members of the life sciences (including interdisciplinary research in Psychology, Chemistry and Mathematics Departments) during the summer of 2005. Davidson biology faculty have been recognized by state, regional and national organizations as leaders in their fields of study.
Send comments, questions, and suggestions to: vecase@davidson.edu