New Science Center
A few years ago, Dominican University of California launched an ambitious program to expand its science program. As an essential component of the liberal arts curriculum, the sciences have always been important at Dominican. The University wanted to offer advanced opportunities for undergraduates to participate in research, gain professional credential before they even graduated, and prepare them for careers in science and medicine.
This focus is what sets Dominican's science program apart and gives it a special place among the nation's universities. At Dominican, opportunities usually reserved for graduate students are available to undergraduates from their very first year on campus. To expand those opportunities, Dominican set about hiring more faculty whose passion for both teaching and research would help students discover possibilities and passions of their own.
Growth Demands More Growth
Success breeds success - and it demands greater efforts. Having attracted the faculty to integrate cutting-edge research into its undergraduate teaching program, the University faced a new challenge: updating its facilities.
The Department of Natural Sciences and Mathematics had outgrown its cramped laboratories and classrooms scattered among five buildings across campus. Professors in different scientific fields had to share laboratory space and equipment. Classes in basic sciences were taught in the same labs where researchers were trying to conduct advanced research, and student researchers had to compete for time in the crowded laboratories. Limited equipment was also limiting teaching and research.
Students and faculty alike desperately needed more space, better research instruments, and separate labs for teaching and research, all under one roof with faculty offices.
The University answered this need with a $20 million, 35,000-square-foot Science Center, which opened its doors in Spring 2007.
Every Student, In Every Discipline
Every Dominican student, from art major to young zoologist - plus tomorrow's teachers, doctors, nurses, scientists, and mathematicians - uses the new Science Center. As part of a liberal arts education, the sciences teach not only how the physical world functions, but how to learn through inquiry - skills that apply across the disciplines and in everyday life.
With eight teaching laboratories, the new Center doubled the number of teaching labs on campus. Students are able to study each scientific discipline in a laboratory dedicated specifically to understanding its principles through hands-on experience.
Science That Can Change Our World
In the new Center's eight research labs, students and faculty are able to spend as much time as they need working on research projects and pursuing new discoveries.
This work will benefit not only students and faculty, but the world at large. Dominican has chosen to support research projects with crucial real-world applications. Dominican faculty have been conducting research on some of today's most vital issues:
- How breast cancer cells develop resistance to medication used for treatment
- Why coral reefs are dying daily
- Why Sudden Oak Death is endangering California's magnificent oak trees, and non-native plant species threatening native species even in protected parks
- How the stem cells of mice, whose properties mirror those of human cells, are programmed to develop into one type of cell rather than another
This cutting-edge research holds the hope of improving the health of humanity and the planet. Dominican's research is important not only to those who conduct it, but those whose lives and environment may depend on its results.
