Integrative Biology

This course introduced many of the fundamentals of biology, from the molecular, cellular, and developmental bases of life to the evolutionary and ecological relationships of individuals and populations. The course has a huge focus on the applications of biology (example below with chosen course project) as well as writing a publishable paper and developing a standardized, repeatable experiment. This includes properly designing and writing out methods that are easy to understand and repeat as well as formulating and displaying resulting data in a coherent and effective manner. This is one course that definitely was essential for many if not all of the further ENSC courses I took at Longwood. The scientific method is used in every aspect of science and is an essential tool to understand when doing any experiment.

One cool project we did in this class was develop an experiment comparing bacterial growth in comparable areas. In my group, 3 fountains were sampled across the campus of Longwood university to test the hypothesis that if people are allowed to wade/swim in a fountain, that fountain is likely to have more bacteria. The final presentation of the entire scientific method we followed and the results we found is linked below.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1GLacTsh7-8HKj1OL_VWvYMy5FfLr7Ry3FHidBb9a0U8/edit?usp=sharing