About the Department of Biology & Biochemistry
The Department of Biology and Biochemistry is a vibrant and ambitious research-based Department encompassing integrated life sciences. With 45 members of academic staff it is one of the largest and most successful departments in the University of Bath and is one of Britain's top Biological Science Departments.
The quality of our teaching was recognised with a maximum of 24 points in the national Teaching Quality Assurance review. In the Research Assessment Exercise 2008, 90% of our research was judged to be internationally recognised, excellent or world-leading in terms of originality, significance or rigour.
The Department houses well-equipped, purpose-built laboratories providing excellent facilities for undergraduate teaching and research. It is ranked 7th in The Times Good University Guide 2009 for Biological Sciences and is an EU Marie Curie training site in Regenerative Medicine.
Our philosophy is to pursue an integrated approach to biological science, and we take the view that tomorrow's advances will be at the interfaces of today's disciplinary divisions. We aim to break down barriers to cross-disciplinary collaboration and believe that in this we have a significant advantage over many much larger and less flexible Institutions.
Teaching Excellence
We are committed to continue providing first rate teaching to our undergraduate programmes in Biology, Molecular & Cellular Biology (MCB), and Biochemistry, and to contribute to the Natural Sciences programme. Our undergraduate courses are unitised, with significant flexibility and cross talk between degree programmes.
For each subject we offer a 3 year BSc, or a 4 year BSc with placement. We offer a 4 year MBiol in MCB and the 4 year MBiochem. Our new teaching laboratories can accommodate up to 180 undergraduates and provides the largest facility of its type in the University.
The Department continues to be the premier UK provider of integrated sandwich course degrees in Biology and Biochemistry, arranging more than 150 student placements each year in industrial, government and University research laboratories in the UK, Europe, the USA and Australia. These one year (or 2 x six month) periods of professional work experience provide our students with the confidence and research expertise that they need to go out as Bath's standard bearers into the world of biological work. The superb employment record of our graduates is a testament to the success of the Bath "sandwich" system.
Research Excellence
Our research spans a broad range of exciting biological questions at the genomic, molecular, cellular, organism and population levels and relating to animals, plants and microorganisms. It is organised into four themes spanning the biological spectrum:
- Structural Biology and Biochemistry
- Developmental and Molecular Cell Biology
- Plants, Insects and Microbes
- Evolutionary Biology and Conservation
These provide a focus for academic research groups and are structured in areas where we have state of the art facilities, critical mass, and can compete most effectively in the global research environment. Our strategy is to strive for excellence by investing in people and resources, and position our research so that it will continue to lead bioscience research internationally.
Three interdisciplinary research centres are based in the department and act as catalysts for inter-department collaborations. This integration creates a broad and invigorating intellectual critical mass.
- The Centre for Regenerative Medicine brings together our developmental biologists with stem cell researchers and tissue engineers in the Departments of Pharmacy and Pharmacology, and Chemical Engineering. Its mission is to understand developmental mechanisms and assist the design of new therapeutics. It has won BBSRC funding for MRes places, EU funding for a Marie Curie Training Site, and a Royal Society-Wolfson infrastructure grant for a tissue engineering laboratory.
- The Centre for Extremophile Research brings together our enzymologists with others in the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Health Protection Agency, Porton Down. Its remit is to investigate properties of enzymes from extremophile organisms and use them in industrial processes.
- The Centre for Mathematical Biology unites our Evolutionary Biologists with the Department of Mathematical Sciences, and explores application of new mathematical techniques to model biological processes.
Our vibrant research culture is propagated through several vigorous seminar series. Departmental seminars with external speakers are held every Tuesday, and cover the whole range of research activity. Internal postgraduate and postdoctoral seminars are held every Thursday lunch-time. We hold an annual Department Research Conference at which academic staff present recent research highlights and postgraduates take part in a poster competition. In addition, most research groups hold weekly internal meetings, and individuals arrange “ad hoc” seminars with typically one or more per week enhancing the regular seminar programme. The department has a lively central coffee room in which journals such as Nature, Science, Cell and the Trends series are available, to stimulate cogitation and discussion.
The Department is proud of its tradition of close links with Industry. Income from industry and governmental applied science agencies stands at over 10% of our current research income. Partnership projects include:
- Development of novel ribonuclease-based cancer therapeutics with Alfacell Corporation
- biotech applications of lipases with TMO Biotech Ltd
- Royal Society Industry Fellowship with Syntaxin Ltd to develop novel therapeutics based on neurotoxins from Clostridia
- Industrial partnership with GlaxoSmithKline
Excellent Facilities
The Department is housed in two adjacent buildings. The 4 South Building, newly refurbished in 1996 at a cost of more than £5million contains over 4500 square metres of superbly furnished research and teaching space. Our new research annex, the 3 South building, was completed in 2005 at a cost of more than £4 million and contains a range of dedicated research facilities.
The Department is excellently equipped for most modern molecular and cellular biological techniques. In addition to the normal research equipment found in any top bioscience centre, the department has state of the art facilities for raising a wide range of experimental organisms, controlled environment rooms for plants and insects, and a tissue engineering laboratory. We have facilities for protein expression and purification, a crystallization robot, X-ray structure determination, and high field NMR (600MHz).
With the Department of Pharmacy and Pharmacology we have created a new Bio-Imaging Suite which has confocal microscopes, a flow cytometer and calcium imaging equipment, all with dedicated technical support. We have access to a suite of scanning, transmission and atomic force electron microscopes.