This is the preliminary (or launch) version of the 2024-2025 VCU Bulletin. We may add courses that expose our students to cutting-edge content and transformative learning. We may also add content to the general education program that focuses on racial literacy and a racial literacy graduation requirement, and may receive notification of additional program approvals after the launch. The final edition and full PDF version will include these updates and will be available in August prior to the beginning of the fall semester.
VCU entered a new era when it implemented, as one of its highest priorities, a new universitywide matrix academic organization called VCU Life Sciences, created in response to the need to prepare students for the anticipated growth in new life sciences jobs in the coming decades. The skills identified for these jobs require highly interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches, often falling between the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines. The way that the life sciences are understood and taught is likely to be fundamentally different, with increasing emphasis on systems biosciences as an important complement to more traditional, purely reductive approaches. The objective of Phase II of VCU’s strategic plan specifically outlines the need to bring VCU’s major academic and administrative divisions together to work on mutual initiatives that will accomplish VCU’s goal of national leadership. VCU Life Sciences is a response to that objective.
Faculty
VCU Life Sciences faculty members are drawn from departments across the university. Lists of participating faculty and academic affiliations are available on the VCU Life Sciences website for each program.
Facilities
VCU Life Sciences comprises the resources and interests not only of the Monroe Park Campus and the VCU Medical Center, but also the Virginia BioTechnology Research Park and the VCU Rice Rivers Center, a property of 342 acres overlooking the James River in Charles City County. The $27 million Eugene P. and Lois E. Trani Center for Life Sciences houses administrative offices, the Center for Environmental Studies, state-of-the-art laboratories and classrooms, and a climate-controlled greenhouse. The Center for Biological Data Science and the High Performance Research Computing Core Facility are housed in Grace E. Harris Hall.
VCU Life Sciences supports two university centers for its research and teaching efforts: the Center for Environmental Studies and the Center for Biological Data Science.