LETTER FROM THE CHAIR
Welcome to the Department of Botany at Miami University. We are one of the premier botany departments in the Nation with over 20 full-time faculty plus several affiliates and adjuncts who hold appointments in other departments. The expertise of the faculty is broadly based in plant biology, with foci in Ecology and Systematics, Cell and Molecular Biology, Structural Plant Biology, and Science Education. We are closely associated with our sibling departments in Zoology and Microbiology, with many cross-listed and team-taught courses provided by approximately 65 faculty in the biosciences. We are located in Pearson Hall, a building with modern classrooms and research laboratories. We regularly utilize several state-of-the-art facilities, including the Electron Microscopy Facility, Center for Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics, Ecology Research Center, Boyd Greenhouses, and the Turrell Herbarium.
Our undergraduates are highly successful at gaining admission into graduate and professional schools or entering the profession in education, industry, government, and non-governmental organizations. Many of our graduates become teachers, researchers, or park naturalists upon graduation, or enter graduate schools in ecology and molecular biology, among other fields. They have a high success rate of entry into medical and law schools (with some of the latter specializing in environmental or patent law). We offer focused degrees in Botany, Environmental Science, and Plant Biotechnology, and our curriculum interfaces with a Molecular Biology Minor and the Environmental Science and Environmental Principles and Practice co-majors. We provide coursework in fundamentals of plant biology, such as plant cell and molecular biology and evolution of plant diversity, and upper division courses in plant physiology, biotechnology, bioinformatics, ecology, plant taxonomy, plant development, mycology, environmental education, among many others. We offer field courses to the Amazon, Bahamas, Kenya, and Nova Scotia, and provide supervised research opportunities the world over, frequently including Mexico and Peru. We provide research opportunities with faculty for all interested students, actively engaging them in ongoing laboratory and field projects. Our integrated approach to undergraduate education, including both traditional and field courses combined with research experiences, provides our graduates with the competitive edge they need to successfully enter the profession or to pursue graduate and professional degrees. Upon graduation, our students express a high level of satisfaction and achieve an extraordinary level of success.
Our graduate program awards masters and doctoral degrees in Botany, as well as interdisciplinary certificates in Ecology and Molecular Biology. Our M.S. students successfully either enter doctoral programs or the profession upon completion of their degrees, and our Ph.D. graduates successfully enter academia and government, either as new faculty at colleges and universities (at liberal arts colleges as well as research-intensive universities), public policy makers for government agencies (e.g. National Science Foundation), research directors in private industry (e.g. Procter and Gamble, Cargill) and government (e.g. USDA, EPA), and conservation biologists for non-governmental organizations (e.g. The Nature Conservancy, Audubon Society). The Botany Department provides many resources to fund graduate research, allowing our students to conduct fieldwork at national and international locations and to conduct equipment-intensive laboratory research. The faculty have active research programs with extramural funding from federal agencies that include the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Department of Energy, USDA, NASA, and the Ohio Plant Biotechnology Consortium. The faculty and students regularly publish and present their research at national conferences.
We invite you to explore our web site and visit our campus so you can meet us first hand. If you would like more information about any of our programs in Botany or faculty expertise, or would like to schedule a visit, please feel free to contact us. We will be happy to provide you with a tour of our facilities, set up meetings with faculty, and provide you with the opportunity to sit in on a class. We are also happy to provide you with more detailed information on careers in plant biology, and data on the long-term success of Miami's Botany graduates.
Dr. Linda Watson, Chair of Botany
watsonle@muohio.edu