Biology Facilities of the Elton B. Stephens Science Facitlity

The Biology Facilities of the
The Elton B. Stephens Science Center
Birmingham-Southern College

The Elton B. Stephens Science Center, which is scheduled to open in February 2002, will house the disciplines of Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Neuroscience. At the heart of the building will be a three story atrium providing a space for social and intellectual interdisciplinary interactions and putting science on display.

The Elton B. Stephens Science Center will anchor a new academic quadrangle, with the Stockham Building, the current Science Complex, which will be renovated to a Humanities Center, and Munger Hall. Stockham and Munger are on the National Historic Registry.

The facilities for the Department of Biology that will be housed in the center will include nine teaching laboratories, nine research laboratories for collaborative student-faculty research, an interdisciplinary environmental studies laboratory, a greenhouse, a zoological museum/herbarium, a radioisotope laboratory, and numerous other equipment, preparatory, and support rooms. Facilities shared with the other science disciplines include lecture, class, computer, conference, study, and seminar rooms, a photographic darkroom, and an animal maintenance suite.

The first floor houses introductory teaching laboratories and support rooms for biology and environmental science; the museum/herbarium; introductory, advanced, and research laboratories and support rooms for physics; three lecture halls; and offices for physics faculty and the Division of Science and Mathematics.

Current research and teaching equipment for biology, accessible to all undergraduate students, includes electrophoresis, blotting, and drying units, hybridization oven and uv crosslinker, spectrophotometers, microtitre plate readers, diode-array UV-Vis spectrophotometers, PCR/thermocycler equipment, liquid scintillation counters, lyophilizer and speed-vac, high speed centrifuges, ultracentrifuges, ultracold freezer, phase-contrast microscope, inverted microscopes, fluorescent microscope, controlled-atmosphere incubators, biological safety cabinets, HPLC, vapor pressure osmometers, impedence meters, oxygen sensors, as well as a range of ancillary equipment including balances, pipetters, pH meters, constant temperature baths, shaker baths, microcentrifuges, and water purification systems. The College provides each faculty member with an office computer and the department is connected to the campus network with e-mail and internet access.

The second floor houses advanced and research laboratories, support rooms, and offices for biology, a classroom and a computer room.

The department's annual library budget is approximately $75,000. There is a subscription list of approximately 50 journals. The library provides numerous on-line searching capabilities and interlibrary loan. The Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences and the Stern Library, both at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, are world-class research libraries only 10 minutes away. As members of the Birmingham Area Consortium of Higher Education, BSC faculty have borrowing privileges there.

The third floor houses introductory, advanced, and research laboratories, support rooms, and offices for chemistry, classrooms, a study room, a seminar room, and a conference room.

The Department of Biology offers more than 20 courses, a major and a minor and disciplinary honors. Four biology courses are required: population and ecosystem biology, organismal biology, cell and molecular biology, and genetics. The remainder of the major consists of biology electives and two semesters of general chemistry.

The ground floor houses teaching and research laboratories, offices, and support spaces for psychology, as well as an animal facility.

The Birmingham-Southern College is among 89 schools described in the Fourth Edition of Research in Biology at Primary Undergraduate Institutions, published by the Council on Undergraduate Research. Leo Pezzementi, a member of the department, was the editor of the Third Edition. Many students in biology participate in undergraduate research projects, make presentations at regional and national conferences, and are coauthors on articles in refereed publications.

Biology Department | Undergraduate Research | Publications
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