Managing emerging pests and diseases as well as those becoming resistant to current controls, describing and utilizing and conserving biological diversity in the face of habitat loss and climate change, designing more effective treatments for traumatic injuries and degenerative conditions and developing biofuels to help meet our growing energy needs while maintaining our capacity to produce food are just a few of the challenges facing our nation and our world. That’s where biology, the largest and fastest growing scientific discipline, comes in. Advances in biology – in fields such as biotechnology, medical research and genetic engineering – improve the quality of life for hundreds of millions of people and lead to the development of stress-tolerant crops, new chemotherapy drugs, more sensitive techniques in forensic science and the use of bacteria and plants to clean up pollution. But there’s still so much to learn and accomplish.

Graduates will: 1a) Effectively integrate and apply biological concepts to solve problems. 1b) Apply their biological training to critically evaluate and accurately explain scientific information, including information from the primary literature. 2a) Effectively apply the hypothetico-deductive method to questions in biology, in a laboratory or research project setting. 2b) Correctly and safely perform common biological laboratory and/or field techniques in a lab/field course or independent research project. 2c) Draw statistically reasonable conclusions from quantitative data, from their own original research or the primary literature. 3a) Construct logical arguments, based on their own data and that of others. 3b) Effectively integrate data from multiple experiments and knowledge from multiple scientific sources in support of a thesis. 3c) Clearly communicate these arguments orally and in writing, in a standard scientific format with accurate use of conventions such as citations, charts, and statistics.