Welcome to the College of Chemical and Life Sciences
at the University of Maryland!

The College has accomplished a great deal in its first decade. The past few years have seen major improvements in our facilities and infrastructure. A new $23M wing for Chemistry and Biochemistry, completed in Fall 2003, provides state-of-the-art teaching and research laboratories for biochemistry and organic chemistry. We can also look forward to a new $62M Bioscience Research Building, funded by the Maryland legislature, in 2006; the groundbreaking took place in September 2004.

Our strong undergraduate academic programs attract approximately 2,100 accomplished, ambitious and enthusiastic students. The entering class for 2004 had an average SAT score of 1263 and an average GPA of 3.96. We have revamped our undergraduate academic, advising and internship programs to ensure that these programs keep pace with the rapid changes in the life sciences and that we are providing our students with the best possible undergraduate education. In 2002, the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute funded our undergraduate program for another four years, providing $1.8M for undergraduate research projects, outreach to K-12, enhancing parts of the curriculum and enabling graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to acquire experience in curriculum development. The University of Maryland ranks 13th in the country in terms of baccalaureate life science graduates who are members of underrepresented groups, and 7th in terms of African-American baccalaureate life science graduates.

The College received $21.3M in external funding for research for FY2003, an increase of 69% since 1999. We currently have training grants for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in hearing, neuroethology and virology from NIH and in population genetics from NSF. The College has approximately 630 graduate students and 135 postdoctoral fellows. Large research grants provide funding for research in environmental pollution, stream restoration, brain imaging, plant genomics, pathogen detection, development of new cancer drugs and vaccines and the evolution of developmental pathways. Two junior faculty members won Packard Fellowships in 2001 for research in protein folding and population genetics, respectively; the former also won a Searle Scholarship. Faculty in the College lead or participate in several externally funded research centers: the NSF-funded Center for Materials Research Science and Engineering (MRSEC), the NIH-funded Center for Comparative and Evolutionary Biology of Hearing (C-CEBH) and the Joint Institute for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (JIFSAN, with the FDA). The College has four Centers that are currently internally funded: the Centers for Biodiversity, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Biomolecular Structure and Organization, and Neuroscience.

From 1999 to 2004, many outstanding new faculty members have joined the College, including:

We welcomed Dr. Michael Doyle, the chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, in Summer 2003. Dr. Doyle most recently served as Professor of Chemistry at the University of Arizona, with prior academic appointments at Hope College and Trinity University. He also served as Vice President and President of Research Corporation.

This is a time of great opportunity for the College. The explosion of new knowledge across the life sciences has created opportunities to address questions across the biological spectrum that were totally inaccessible a decade ago. We are particularly well positioned to develop cutting-edge academic and research programs because of our proximity to the unique public and private scientific resources in Maryland and the greater D.C. area. We have accomplished a great deal to date, and the best is yet to come!

Dr. Norma Allewell
Dean

Biographical information for Dean Allewell