Biology

You’ll want a strong background in the science plus opportunities to explore and experience a specific career path. You’ll get this at Augustana.

About half of our biology majors go on to graduate school for biology, genetics or ecology, or into medical, dental, nursing or veterinarian programs.

Use the major as a foundation for one of our outstanding pre-professional health programs, then continue to graduate school for optometry, occupational or physical therapy, pharmacy or physician assistant careers. Or go directly into a position in research, industry or government.

To help you navigate the complexities and find what inspires you most, you’ll have talented, devoted faculty. All biology professors lead both their class and lab sessions. Many conduct important, nationally funded research in partnership with their students.

Augustana offers a biology major and minor, a biology teaching major and a major in pre-medicine, plus coordinated degree programs and affiliations with graduate programs in the professional health sciences.

Distinctions

• Every year, select biology majors have life-changing internships through Augustana’s summer internship program with the Texas Medical Center in Houston, the largest medical complex in the world. Augustana is one of only a few colleges and universities invited to participate in this prestigious program. Other biology majors intern around the country or as far as Australia, or with faculty in labs right here on campus.

• One of the many laboratories in Augustana’s Hanson Hall of Science is the human anatomy lab for work with human cadavers, a rare opportunity for undergraduates.

• Augustana’s study abroad programs often include a biology focus — from biodiversity or health care in Costa Rica, to ethnozoology in Latin America, to conservation in Ghana.

•  Our location along the Mississippi River is a bonus, whether you are interested in aquatic biology, health care, education or the environment. The college’s three field stations provide access to the rich learning laboratories of open fields, upland hardwood forest, native loess hill prairies, a limestone cliff, streams and wetlands, and a floodplain forest along the Rock River.

Recent graduates

Giang Pham '21 is a research associate at Yale College of Medicine.

TaJania Jenkins '21 is pursuing a master's in pathology at the University at Buffalo.

Diangelo Gonzalez '21 has a paid internship in the Department of Genetics at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Kayla Dillon '21 is an associate research specialist for the School of Pharmacy at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Natalie Hardy '20 is pursuing a Ph.D. in health care ethics at Saint Louis University.

Monica Wierzbicki '18 received a master's in biomedical visualization at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a medical illustrator at Body Scientific International, Ingleside, Ill.

Valeria Melo '18 is attending medical school at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

Launch Explore more in Hanson Hall of Science