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I'm Tom Crist chair of the Department of Biology. I'd like to welcome you to Pearson Hall and to one of our teaching labs here in Pearson. We have about undergraduate majors in biology and graduate students and faculty. We have a very strong pre professional emphasis in our department but we also have programs in environmental science and plant science as well. You're seeing a newly renovated teaching lab for human physiology. So one of the things you see in this lab is that it's a more open space. It allows students to move more freely in the lab. It also allows for more student collaboration. One of the really nice features of the lab is that we have three video screens that are available to each of the student groups that are here. We can simultaneously project instructions about the lab. The laboratories sections are taught by graduate students and then the lecture sections are taught by our faculty. Here we're in a faculty research lab that's shared by two neurophysiology faculty and a mammalogist. The open faculty lab space is separated from some of the smaller sub rooms that have more specific functions. This room is for precision weighing and for microscopy work. And the open lab space is a combination of a wet bench chemistry and a variety of other sort of general tasks in some cases computers that are connected to instruments. The open spaces have utility connections to the ceiling. So they're movable and flexible. Multiple research groups can use the space simultaneously and it gives an opportunity for graduate students faculty and undergraduates to work together collaboratively in the research space. Another example of the more specialized sub room spaces that we have is an electrophysiology rig in this lab. This allows us to control temperature precisely for the needs. It also is electrically shielded so that the signals that are detected by the researcher aren't interfered with surrounding electrical background. As you can see we have state of the art research facilities and the opportunities for students to work with faculty and graduate students to get hands on research experiences in both research labs and teaching that will help them succeed as scientists.
