History

The College of Chemical and Life Sciences was created in 1993, with the mission of developing and supporting outstanding research, educational and outreach programs in discovery oriented, fundamental or basic chemistry and biology. Before that, the life sciences were part of the College of Agriculture and Chemical and Life Sciences. Today, the college’s four departments—Biology, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics, and Entomology—comprise a total of 125 tenure/tenure-track faculty members, 110 instructors, lecturers, and postdoctoral scientists, 2,500 undergraduates, and 700 graduate students.

Collaborative Research

The College of Chemical and Life Sciences collaborates with other units in the University of Maryland System with complementary programs in the life sciences, most notably the medical school (University of Maryland, Baltimore or UMB), University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), the Center for Environmental Sciences (CES) and the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute (UMBI), which includes the Center for Biosystems Research on the College Park campus, the Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology (CARB) in Shady Grove and the Center of Marine Biotechnology (COMB) in Baltimore.

Strategic Location & Partnerships

The University of Maryland’s strategic location in the Washington, DC metropolitan region gives us a unique advantage and access to several federal agencies with closely related missions in the life sciences, most notably the National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, National Institute for Standards and Technology, Smithsonian Institution, Goddard Space Flight Center, the Beltsville Agriculture Research Center and the National Fish and Wildlife Service. We are also located in the midst of burgeoning biotechnology, information technology and pharmaceutical industries, and close to several nearby medical schools and hospitals with strong clinical research programs. The College of Chemical and Life Sciences has an impressive core of accomplished, creative and ambitious faculty, excellent undergraduate programs and increasingly strong graduate and research programs housed within our Departments of Biology, Cell Biology & Molecular Genetics, Chemistry & Biochemistry, and Entomology.

Targeted Research Initiatives and State-of-the-art Facilities

The University has committed unequivocally to making the development of the life sciences its top priority. A new Chemistry wing with state-of-the-art teaching laboratories and research laboratories opened in 2003, and the $69 million Bioscience Research Building opened in September 2007.

The College has targeted five strategic initiatives for development:

• Comparative and functional genomics
• Ecological sustainability
• Host-pathogen interactions
• Nanoscience and biomaterials
• Sensory neuroscience

The nanoscience initiative is a partnership with the A. James Clark School of Engineering and the College of Computer, Mathematical and Physical Sciences. The College also sponsors the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology with the College of Computer, Mathematical and Physical Sciences.