Biology Curriculum

The department has taken the lead on redesigning and revising our pre-med curriculum to meet the changing 2015 MCAT and to address the growing and urgent national problem of declining African American professionals in the field of medicine. With the generous support of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) funding of $1 million dollars to the University, Dr. Ireland, Endowed Professor of Biology, led the efforts by working with faculty in Biology and other STEM disciplines to implement specific recommendations issued by the Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians (SFFP) committee. A joint venture between the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the HHMI, the SFFP's goal is to make students more active learners with demonstrated knowledge and ability to apply the principles of biology, mathematics, and statistics along with those of computer programs, physics, chemistry and biochemistry to human health and diseases. 

To accomplish this, the department introduced an array of innovative instructional approaches. Two new courses in Biology (Biol 1210L and Biol 1220L) were launched to address self-reported impediments for freshman-level success and labs will be revised to include more discovery/research-oriented projects such as those in Xavier's currently HHMI funded 'Phage Genomics' course offered in our department. Several additional pre-med courses have been infused with increased in-class activities, more interdisciplinary content, and exercises to hone students' computational and critical thinking skills with an emphasis on the application of knowledge as opposed to rote memorization. We believe that our new and improved curriculum will help all our majors to become more competitive and score well on whichever standardized admissions tests they end up taking (MCAT, GRE, DAT, PCAT, etc).