"Tenure-Track Position in Biology"

Job Details

Hillsdale College is a small (1500 students), fiercely independent Christian liberal arts college dedicated to the perpetuation of freedom through serious learning and moral formation. It is committed to the Western intellectual tradition and requires genuine excellence in undergraduate teaching. The college is seeking a broadly trained biologist with specific expertise in any of the following: cell biology, molecular biology, microbiology, virology, or biomedical science. The successful candidate will teach an introductory cellular/molecular biology course for biology majors and pre-professional students, liberal arts biology for non-majors, and additional courses in the candidate’s specialty. The successful candidate will also advise upper-level biology majors on their capstone senior thesis research projects.

The mission of the biology department is to explain, in the context of the liberal arts, how life relates, adapts, and evolves in an ever-changing environment. All biology majors take upper-level courses in cell/molecular biology, organismal biology, genetics, ecology/evolutionary biology, and biostatistics. All lectures and labs are taught by the faculty, and students have hands-on access to advanced equipment. Biology majors spend a semester as a laboratory teaching assistant and undertake a four-semester sequence of specialized research starting their junior year. The department boasts a high student placement rate in graduate and professional schools, and scores in the top 3–5% nationally on the ETS standardized biology subject test. The teaching of organic evolution is conspicuous and central to the curriculum.

Current facilities include qPCR/RT-qPCR genetic sequencing, confocal, widefield fluorescent, and scanning electron microscopy, cell counter, level 2 biosafety lab, cell culture lab, environmental control chambers, HPLC and gas chromatographs, and a dedicated cadaver lab with advanced iWorx physiology system. Other facilities include the 700-acre G.H. Gordon Biological Station and the on-campus Slayton Arboretum and Fisk Museum of Natural History. Laboratory space and start-up funds will be available to the successful candidate. Research programs are not dependent on public grants, but are instead supported internally.