Department Details

Sac State Biology

Our Department provides many undergraduate and graduate degrees and prides itself on making the well-being, education, and training of our students a top priority.

Information about degree programs and courses can be found in the Catalog.

Pre-major

The Department no longer has a pre-major

Research Opportunities

Our faculty have diverse and exciting research interests, including topics such as bacterial diversity, genetics, neurodevelopment, functional morphology, marine biology, wetland ecology, evolutionary biology, and tropical fish biology. This research has been supported by local, state, and federal funding agencies, including the CSU Biotechnology (CSUBIOTECH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). We are also affiliated with Moss Landing Marine Laboratories near Monterey.

All of our research directly includes both undergraduate and graduate students and mentorship is highly valued. Students also regularly present at local and national conferences and have co-authored journal articles.

To learn more about faculty research interests, click here.

Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences

In addition to independent research in faculty research labs, students majoring in the Biological Sciences also have the opportunity to engage in authentic research experiences in the classroom.

At Sacramento State, course-based undergraduate research experiences (CURES), also referred to as authentic learning experiences (ALEs), are embedded in a variety of laboratory courses as part of the SIRIUS (Sustainable Interdisciplinary Research to Inspire Undergraduate Success) Project, an NSF supported program.

The first phase of the SIRIUS Project involved the redesign and coordination of 12 laboratory courses within the Department of Biological Sciences at Sacramento State, all focused on a common theme – the human impacts of the American River ecosystem. The SIRIUS Project has since expanded to include 67 courses, including biology, chemistry, geology and environmental studies courses, at five institutions across the Sacramento region, all playing a major role in ongoing river research through undergraduate student engagement in course-based ALEs.

To learn more about the SIRIUS project and CUREs/ALEs, click here.