This course introduces students to the academic study of Buddhism through readings, lectures, and discussions. Students explore the ways that Buddhism is analyzed and interpreted through the perspectives of different academic disciplines, including anthropology, art, environmental humanities, gender studies, government, literature, philosophy, and religion. Each week features a different methodological approach. Materials to be considered include discourses of the Buddha, meditation manuals, painting, poetry, philosophical treatises, and more.

Offered as BKX 202 and PYX 202. This course focuses on various professional practice aspects of publishing, including manuscript submissions, selection, poetry craft and literary citizenship, through Nine Syllables Press, in partnership with the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center. Students learn about the publishing industry and contemporary US poetry landscape. Students have the opportunity to directly participate in reading and selecting manuscripts for a chapbook to be published by Nine Syllables Press. Preference given to Poetry and Book Studies concentrators. Cannot be taken S/U.

This seminar provides the opportunity to meet and collaborate with the other students in the BIO MS program, gain experience describing and sharing planned thesis research with others, and develop professional skills related to crafting research proposals, reading and critiquing scientific literature, and public presentation.  This course is required for graduate students and must be taken both years.  Restrictions: BIO graduate students only. Instructor permission required.

This lab course involves field and laboratory investigations of plant ecology and conservation, with an emphasis on Northeastern plant species and plant communities. The labs explore interactions between plants and insects, visit wetland and upland habitats and investigate plant population dynamics at sites around western Massachusetts. Students gain hands-on experience with descriptive and experimental research approaches used to investigate ecological processes in plant communities and inform conservation of plant biodiversity. Corequisite: BIO 364. Enrollment limited to 20.

This course surveys the environmental factors, historical processes and ecological interactions that influence the distribution and abundance of plant species in the landscape and informs conservation of rare and threatened plant species. The class examines how plant communities are assembled and what processes influence their structure and diversity, including past and present human activities, climate change and exotic species.

Diverse fields from ecology to neuroscience rely on measures of animal behavior to reveal new insights into how individuals interact with their physical and social environments. Scientists integrate both high-tech (remote imaging, AI) and low-tech (human observation) solutions to record, track, and analyze patterns of behavior in the wild and in the lab. This course gives students experience with several methods of quantifying and analyzing animal behavior in both field-based and lab-based investigations.

There is increasing evidence of epigenetic phenomena influencing the development of organisms and the transmission of information between generations. These epigenetic phenomena include the inheritance of acquired morphological traits in some lineages and the apparent transmission of RNA caches between generations in plants, animals and microbes. This seminar explores emerging data on epigenetics and discusses the impact of these phenomena on evolution. Participants write an independent research paper on a topic of their choice. Prerequisite: BIO 230, BIO 232 or equivalent.

This colloquium explores a class of phenomena broadly categorized as “resistance.” Specifically, the course asks whether the heterogeneous settings in which that term arises suggest a single underlying mechanism leading to resistance, or conversely, whether disparate phenomena have been inappropriately grouped together under a single rubric. Resistance is a concept has been evoked at all levels of biological (and non-biological) organization, from the viral to the political.

This lab covers genomic analysis pipelines from nucleic acid isolation to sequence analysis in Linux and R environments. Students independently design and execute a high-throughput sequencing experiment to measure genetic variation in natural populations. Corequisite: BIO 336. Prerequisite: BIO 230, BIO 232 or equivalent. Enrollment limited to 15.

Ongoing developments in high-throughput sequencing technologies have made genomic analysis a central feature of many scientific disciplines, including forensics, medicine, ecology and evolution. This course reviews the scope and applications of genome sequencing projects. After completing the course, students are prepared to design a high-throughput sequencing project and interpret the results of genomic analysis. Corequisite: BIO 337. Prerequisite: BIO 230 or BIO 232. Enrollment limited to 15.