Arts & Sciences

[1] This is a word cloud based on the research interests of the Department's faculty.

A note from Dr. Tim Collins, Professor and Department Chair:

The Department of Biological Sciences at FIU provides training and research opportunities for undergraduates and graduate students in a wide range of biological disciplines. On any given day, Biological Sciences faculty and their students may be diving on a coral reef in the Florida Keys, cruising through the Everglades on an airboat, hiking through a tropical rainforest, or breaking new ground in the laboratory. Our mission is to educate broadly-trained life scientists, to carry out basic and applied biological research, to disseminate the results of our research, and to provide meaningful service to the University, the local community, and the World. Our curriculum is rigorous and provides a background in critical thinking, research, and communications skills. Our undergraduate majors have successfully entered careers in the life sciences in public, private and non-profit organizations. Many of them enter graduate school in the life sciences, or professional schools such as medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, or veterinary science. Our graduate degrees are designed to prepare the next generation of research scientists for academics, government, and industry.

The research interests of our faculty span many levels of biological organization from molecules to ecosystems, and include both field and laboratory based studies in marine, terrestrial, and freshwater environments. We address basic biological questions about how organisms work, how they develop, how they interact with other organisms and their environments, and how they have evolved over time. Active areas of research include cell and molecular biology, ecology, functional morphology, genetics, conservation biology, neurobiology and behavior, evolutionary biology and population genetics, phylogenetics and bioinformatics, physiology, virology, microbiology, and paleobiology. Florida International University is ideally situated for the study of tropical biology and many of our faculty specialize in tropical systems. The breadth of our approaches to biological problems allows students in our department to benefit from interdisciplinary collaborations with departments throughout the university, including biochemistry and chemistry, forensic science, physics, and engineering. The faculty, staff and students in the Department publish over 100 scientific papers yearly that describe the research funded by over $10M annually in grants and contracts.

Dr. Tim Collins

[1]: A word cloud is a weighted list in which the size of a word is proportional the number of times it has occurred in the text. Common use words (e.g. "that", "and" etc.) are removed, so that only key words remain. The word cloud therefore gives us an idea of the interests and key themes of faculty research.