Graduate
Research Facilities
The
Department of Biological Sciences is housed in the Galvin
Life Science Center. The facilities are excellent for
most types of laboratory research in biology. Facilities
include controlled environmental rooms, DNA sequences
and microarrays, confocal and electron microscopes, a
greenhouse, radioisotope rooms with specialized equipment,
ultracentrifuges, electrophoretic and chromatographic
equipment, sterile transfer rooms, state-of-the-art computing
equipment, facilities for behavioral and electrophysiological
research, and the World Health Organization's Aedes Reference
Center. In addition, the Freimann Life Science Center
provides a modern animal care facility for research and
teaching. Two lakes on campus, several nearby natural
areas and the University's 7,345-acre Environmental
Research Center in northern Wisconsin offer a wide
variety of habitats for ecological, limnological, and
entomological field studies. The Department is affiliated
with the Duke
University Marine Laboratory in Beaufort, North Carolina
and is a member of Duke's Marine Sciences Education Consortium.
There are six specialized
research libraries
on campus plus the main Hesburgh Library. These libraries
contain a total of more than 2 million volumes and 2.5
million microform units and subscribe to 20,500 serials.
All of the libraries use an automated circulation system
and direct access to an on-line catalog for locating materials
throughout the system. The University is a member of the
Center for Research Libraries and has access to more than
three million volumes of research materials.
Ten University computing
clusters, including more than 450 workstations and 30
dedicated terminals, are situated throughout the campus.
The clusters and virtually all academic buildings are
linked in a fiber-based network to campus resources, including
the Hesburgh Library's on-line catalog, a campuswide information
system and electronic mail system, and research computing
facilities such as the High
Performance Computing Center. The Notre Dame Network
provides access to national supercomputing and data resource
facilities via its regional link to the Internet. The
department's diverse microcomputer systems are used extensively
in teaching and research.
The
department's Greene-Nieuwland Herbaria contain about 250,000
specimens. The Radiation
Laboratory, a University institute for high-energy
radiation studies, and the Center
for Environmental Science and Technology provide facilities
for biological and environmental research. In addition,
the University maintains a Bioscience Core Facility to
provide basic biochemical support for cellular and molecular
biology. The University publishes the journal The American
Midland Naturalist.
