About the Department
Department of Biology | About the Department | About Biology | Compare the Majors | Creation
With a history which extends more than fifty years, the BJU Biology Department is without parallel in the realm of Christian education. The faculty all have Ph.D. degrees from leading graduate schools throughout the U.S. and are skilled communicators averaging nearly 30 years of college-level teaching experience. Their teaching puts modern scientific discoveries in the appropriate biblical context to prepare students to know what they believe and why. The biology major aims to provide training which properly captures the breadth of biology while maintaining the necessary depth of preparation needed by graduates who will pursue further specialized training in graduate or professional schools.
Facilities and Equipment
Facilities
The Biology Department shares the Howell Science Building with the departments of Chemistry, Physics, and Family/Consumer Science. Our facilities were extensively remodeled recently and were thoroughly updated at that time. The Biology Department has three modern, well-equipped laboratories as well as an advanced projects laboratory where upper-level research is conducted. Support facilities include preparation and equipment rooms as well as a plant and animal room for maintaining living specimens. The department also houses a herbarium and the Waterman Bird collection which includes a variety of songbirds and birds of prey (dating back to before 1910!).
Equipment
The following equipment is available for your use:
- high-quality binocular compound and dissecting microscopes for each student
- several research-quality microscopes equipped with digital video, digital still, 35 mm, and Polaroid cameras
- a closed-circuit TV system feeding laserdisk, videotape, and computer-generated video to all teaching labs and lecture rooms
- LCD projectors to interface with computers for presentations
- ultra-low temperature freezer
- Bio-Pac and PowerLab human physiology interfaces for Macintosh computers
- high-quality analytical balances
- ultraviolet/visible spectrophotometers
- superspeed refrigerated high-capacity centrifuge
- microcentrifuges
- electrophoresis apparatus, PCR thermal cycler, ultra-pure water system, and supporting equipment for genetic analysis.
Computers
A computer resource room in the Science Building is equipped with a dozen fast Macintosh computers, each thoroughly outfitted with lab simulation, tutorial, and other scientific software packages. The computer room also contains a color scanner and audio/video-import interfaces and is linked via a high-speed network to high-quality laser printers.
Program
Core Courses
The curriculum combines a solid emphasis on mastery of facts and understanding of principles with the application of those facts and principles to scientific problem-solving. As the field of biology has grown, our curriculum has kept pace. We were a pioneer in seeing the need to thoroughly develop in students an understanding of principles common to all the biological disciplines before the students proceed to specialized courses. In the 1960s the course General Biology was first offered. This was followed in the 1980s by the addition of General Biology II. More recently the cellular/molecular perspective has caused a revolution in biological thought, and we responded with the addition of a required sophomore-level course, Essentials of Cell Biology, in 1999.
Emphasis on "Doing Science"
As Biology has increasingly become an experimental science, the Biology Department has increased its emphasis on teaching experimental design and on proper application of the scientific method. The laboratory component of all three of our core courses (General Biology I and II and Essentials of Cell Biology) is particularly structured around the development of this way of thinking. Many of our courses develop this focus further in the context of particular biological disciplines. Upper-level students have the option of pursuing laboratory research through our Independent Studies course during the regular academic year and in a two-month-long Research in Biology course which involves full-time research in the summer.