Biological Sciences Department Description

The Department of Biological Sciences has graduate and post-graduate research programs in molecular and cell biology, cancer biology, molecular and developmental genetics, and molecular neuroscience. Students may obtain the MA from Hunter College and/or the PhD jointly from Hunter College and the City University Graduate Center. The doctoral program is designed to prepare students to cope with the radical changes in direction and experimental approaches that will characterize future developments in biology, as well as to train highly qualified research scientists who are fully equipped to teach and to direct research in a wide variety of university and industry programs in the biological sciences.

Faculty of the department are pursuing projects in the forefront of modern research. In addition to the individual research laboratories, a number of shared facilities are housed in the department. They include transmission and scanning electron microscopes, a sequencing and synthesis facility equipped with a DNA synthesizer, a peptide synthesizer, a gasphase sequencer, DNA sequencer and advanced HPLC and data processing equipment, a bioimaging facility, a fluorescence-activated cell sorter and a biopreparation facility. Several facilities are available through the chemistry department, including X-ray diffraction, NMR, mass spectroscopy and biomolecular computation. Shared modern animal facilities are also available.