Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences

Welcome!

The Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences welcomes you to the web-pages in English. On these pages we are giving you a brief introduction of the department and its activities.

The department was established in the beginning of 2004 together with the Faculty of Biosciences by merging the previous smaller biological departments in Helsinki into a one large department of the new faculty. Now, all the basic biological disciplines are covered by our department and all parts of the department are physically located on the same campus at Viikki. The Viikki campus of biological sciences, which is located about 7 km north of the Helsinki city centre, is additionally the home for the applied biological sciences which have been organized under the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry and the Faculty of Veterinary Sciences. Furthermore, the Faculty of Pharmacy, the Institute of Biotechnology, Neuroscience Center and several startup companies are located at the same Campus.

The different disciplines of the new department have been divided into eight majors:

• Aquatic Sciences
• Biochemistry
• Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
• Environmental Sciences
• General Microbiology
• Genetics
• Physiology
• Plant Biology

The department has (in 2004) about 1200 under-graduate students, about 500 graduate-students, over 380 teachers and researchers and a technical support and administrative staff of about 50 persons. Additionally to the eight majors, the department coordinates a joint interdisciplinary programme on Biotechnology in the Helsinki area. The other participants of this program are the Faculties of Agriculture and Forestry, Pharmacy, and Natural Sciences of the University of Helsinki, Helsinki University of Technology and Helsinki School of Economics. The department is also responsible on education of schoolteachers in biology.

Academic research at the department is almost completely based on external funding obtained by competition and it is internationally oriented with a very wide range of research topics. The scale of research targets goes from atoms and molecules through cells and individuals up to the populations and ecosystems level. There are several Centres of Excellence, as granted by the Academy of Finland, working at the department. Domestic connections are extensive and research activity is high, which provides good working opportunities for our students. This results, among other benefits, in a high annual number of doctoral theses (50 in 2004).