Aerial view of campus with Williamsport, the Susquehanna River and Bald Eagle Mountain as a backdrop

Cell and Molecular Biology Track

The Cell and Molecular Biology Track provides students with the background, experience and skills sought after by leading graduate programs and institutions and companies that conduct biomedical research. We get interested students involved research projects as early as possible, often before the end of the first year. This makes students highly competitive for summer research internships, and they frequently comment that they were better prepared and had more experience than other interns at their site.

Our Program features cell and tissue culture to study the development of neurons and cancer cell growth, advanced phase and fluorescence microscopy, access to DNA microarrays through the Genome Consortium for Active Teaching (GCAT) and DNA sequencing and Bioinformatics to identify new species of microbes from a variety of environments. Of course we also have instrumentation for standard Molecular Biology work such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR), cloning and electrophoresis.

Current students and recent graduates who have chosen the Cell and Molecular Biology Track have presented and won awards for their research at conferences such as the Society for Neuroscience in Atlanta, the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) in Toronto and Boston, the Pennsylvania Academy of Sciences (PAS) and the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) Undergraduate Research Symposium.

Recent graduates have gone on to Ph.D. programs at Harvard, Boston University, Vanderbilt, University of Maryland, Purdue, Georgetown, Thomas Jefferson University, Lehigh University, Case Western Reserve University and many others.

Other graduates have taken scientific positions at Merck Pharmaceuticals, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, the American Type Culture Collection, The Wadsworth Center, Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Hershey Medical Center and other companies and institutions.

So if Cell and Molecular Biology sounds like the career path for you, come join us in the lab!

For more information on degree requirements and course descriptions, please refer to the College Catalog.