Biology: Concentration in Cell and Molecular Biology
Bachelor of Science
About this program
The Bachelor of Science in Biology: Concentration in Cell and Molecular Biology prepares you to explore fascinating ways that genes and biomolecules drive the behavior and health of the building blocks of life. You’ll gain hands-on lab experience in cutting-edge science practices and research training with techniques like microscopy, genomics and cell culture. The program supports pre-med paths, research careers and advanced study, guiding you toward science work in health, biotech or academia.
Program Curriculum and Requirements
Program Scope
The CMB major focuses on the fundamental building blocks of ourselves and other eukaryotic organisms: genes, biomolecules and cells. Courses and electives in the major connect these topics to themes across biology like health, biodiversity and evolution. The CMB major also provides training in cutting-edge science practices like genomic sequencing, cell and tissue culture, microscopy, computational biology and community engagement.
In all of our concentrations, research experiences in the labs of our world-class faculty and instructors are an integral part of student training. Hands-on experiences in our research labs, through our Biology Undergraduate Research Program (BURP), prepare our graduates for high-level jobs in industry or further training toward a higher degree.
CMB faculty work on a wide range of research questions that span the tree of life, using techniques that vary from whole-organism studies down to purely computational approaches to understanding how the building blocks of life produce the complexity and diversity of the world around us, in health and disease.
Program Learning Outcomes
- Understanding the process of science: students can design an experiment with the appropriate control groups to test a hypothesis.
- Quantitative reasoning: students can interpret a graph or dataset to determine if the results of an experiment support or reject a hypothesis.
- Relationship between science and society: students can weigh the costs and benefits to society of the use of recent scientific and technological developments.
- Evolution: students can explain the role that variation between individuals plays in the processes of natural selection and evolution.
- Relationship between structure and function: students can explain how a change in the structural characteristics of a molecule, tissue, or organism will affect its function.
- Information flow and storage: students can describe the mechanisms of information flow in classical and molecular genetics and predict the outcomes of crosses.
- Pathways and transformation of matter and energy: students can explain how a carbon molecule flows through a biological process or system.
- Systems (i.e., Living systems are interconnected and interacting): students can predict the consequences of how a change in one aspect of a biological or complex system will affect other aspects of the system.