Undergraduate Opportunities That Can Change Lives
Under the direction of Dr. Sibdas Ghosh, chair of the Department of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, students at Dominican are investigating current issues in biochemistry that have profound implications for protecting the environment and producing food for the world. Students are working to discover how Sudden Oak Death kills trees in California, looking for soil bacteria that help plants survive drought, and investigating how non-native plants spread in protected areas, threatening to wipe out native species.
"I'm very grateful for Dominican," said student researcher Desaree Williams. Her experience in the lab has helped open the doors to graduate school and more research opportunities. "And the confidence I gained working with professors one-on-one will help me in future professional relationships."
At most universities, students don't get to try their hand at research until they reach graduate school. At Dominican, even freshmen have the opportunity to uncover new passions and test their interests before deciding to pursue a career in science.
Whether their next step is a graduate degree in academics or in a profession such as medicine, science majors at Dominican have an edge in applying for admission to the universities of their choice for advanced studies. Laboratory experience gives them the significant advantage of knowing how to structure an experiment, use laboratory equipment, record results, analyze data and present their findings for peer review. They gain professional credentials by presenting research findings at peer conferences and co-authoring scientific papers with Dominican faculty for publication and presentation at professional meetings.
Those opportunities are bringing more and more students to Dominican to study the sciences, and have led to a retention rate of 80 percent of science majors - far surpassing the national average of 50 percent. Undergraduate science majors have been accepted into summer intern programs at Harvard University, Stanford University, the National Institutes of Health and others. And Dominican graduates are working for prestigious institutions like the Human Genome Project, the La Jolla Cancer Research Foundation, Genentech, and the United States Park Service.
