Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Apply the concept of homeostasis to explain how specific physiological systems are regulated in different animal systems.
2. Describe how environmental conditions lead to physiological responses, comparing mechanisms that come into play in short term, long term, and how the responses change over evolutionary time.
3. Describe how evolution has influenced the diversity in physiological systems.
4. Explain how muscles, nerves, and cell signaling form the basis of physiological systems.
5. Explain how physiological systems operate, integrating between biological levels of organization: from molecules to cells, tissues, and organisms.
6. Identify similarities and differences in how diverse animals use physiology to solve similar problems.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. You will be using a group project, such as a plant magazine article, to discuss, evaluate, and critique the latest findings and ideas in plant biology by reading and synthesizing results from the primary scientific literature and like sources, and assessing their credibility and its broad significance to society.
2. You will be using plant biology case studies to research, analyze, and communicate biological questions, concepts and results to a variety of audiences using written and discussion forums.
3. You will be working in teams and will thus establish your ability to work individually and on a team to produce high-quality, synthetic and incisively written and social media projects, applying strategies for time management and collaboration.
4. You will integrate, explain, and apply foundational and advanced knowledge underlying metabolic and physiological processes unique to plants.
5. You will integrate, explain, and apply foundational and advanced knowledge underlying the interactions that occur between the environment and plant growth and development.
6. You will integrate, explain, and apply foundational and advanced knowledge underlying the relationship between structure and function as it relates to plant macromolecules, cells, and tissues.

Course Learning Outcomes:

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Describe how and why the effects of Darwinian evolution have brought us to this critical stage in the history of humanity.
2. Evaluate why philosopher, Blaise Pascal considered that, "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone"- (Penses, 1670) and why poet, T.S. Eliot mused, "humankind cannot bear very much reality"- (No. 1 of Four Quartets, 1943).
3. Explain how an understanding of this "human journey" helps to account for a wide range of contemporary human affairs and cultural norms.
4. Identify and define the urgent challenges facing human civilization today, and why many authorities warn that "business as usual" cannot be sustained.
5. Participate in prescribing a way forward for the design of a new, more sustainable, and more humanistic model of civilization for our descendants.
6. Predict how the genetic legacies inherited from our ancestors, and how our continuing evolution as a species (informed by both natural selection and cultural selection) are likely to affect our human natures, our social lives, and our cultures in future generations.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Explain and interpret government regulations and laws that determine the safety of biotechnological products.
2. Explain and interpret the benefits and drawbacks of using biotechnology in the fields of agriculture, food processing, medicine, and forensics.
3. Explain and interpret the moral and ethical issues that are associated with the use of biotechnology.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Apply theories seeking to explain the evolution of complex secondary sexual characters and mating behaviours to examples from nature.
2. Compare and evaluate the nature and quality of media coverage of recent scientific discoveries related to the evolution of sex and resultant processes such as disease / parasitism, competition for mates, and coevolution.
3. Contrast competing theories for the evolutionary advantages conferred by sexual reproduction and the origins of distinct mating types.
4. Explain the consequences of sharing a gene pool with other organisms (the benefits and costs) at the level of the individual, the population and the species.
5. Interpret, explain, and contextualize recent research findings published in the primary scientific literature in accessible written assignments.
6. Recognize the paradoxical origins of sexual reproduction and its central role in the evolution of multi-celled life on earth.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Develop an understanding of how experiments are designed, and the importance of controls and analyses.
2. Gain an improved understanding of the function of animal physiological systems through experimental approaches and hands-on learning.
3. Gain expertise using diverse tools and equipment used in laboratory-based physiological studies.
4. Learn how to prepare reports with specific requirements, integrating what is known from previous studies with novel data collected in lab.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. As part of a team, you will communicate biological questions, concepts, and results to a variety of audiences in written and oral formats.
2. The core plant biology labs as designed will allow you to develop, apply, and master the skills for scientific investigation, from hypothesis development and testing to proper experimental design to statistical analysis.
3. The plant biology labs will allow you to establish, apply and master a number of technical skills and experimental strategies applicable to a broad range of scientific endeavours in the field of plant biology, and this includes troubleshooting.
4. The plant biology labs will allow you to hone your ability to work individually and, on a team, to produce high-quality, synthetic and incisively written and oral projects, applying strategies for time management and collaboration.
5. You will advance and integrate your knowledge of plant biology and its principles with core experimental techniques to analyze real-world problems and phenomena associated with plants.
6. You will as part of a team conduct self-driven, independent research on a problem in plant biology that involves the analysis of existing research on the topic and undertaking new research on new or related aspects. This independent research project encompasses all stages of scientific investigation including: the development of research questions and formulation of appropriate hypotheses; development of experimental design; data collection, data management and application of appropriate statistics; critical interpretation of empirical evidence to test hypotheses; synthetic integration with core concepts; communication of findings in oral and written formats, such as a grant proposal, a journal report, and seminar.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Generate and analyze experimental data.
2. Modify experimental protocols to use appropriately the scientific tools available.
3. Operate and understand the inner working of scientific devices used in biology, chemistry, biotechnology and medicine.
4. Produce experimental protocol from published techniques.
5. Select and design experimental strategies to detect and quantify a molecule of interest.
6. Verbally synthesize experimental protocol and results.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Combine experimental techniques to complete a scientific inquiry.
2. Defend and criticize experimental results.
3. Generate and analyze experimental data.
4. Modify experimental protocols to use appropriately the scientific tools available.
5. Operate and understand the inner working of scientific devices used in biology, chemistry, biotechnology, and medicine.
6. Produce experimental protocol from published techniques.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Work effectively and fairly in a collaborative team environment.
2. Discuss, evaluate, and critique biological findings and ideas by reading and synthesizing results from the primary scientific literature.
3. Prepare high-quality, synthetic and incisively written and oral projects.
4. Critically evaluate written and oral presentations by your peers.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Communicate the results of the literature synthesis in written format.
2. Critically evaluate and synthesize the scientific literature about the ecology of lakes and streams to reveal strengths and weakness of published studies.
3. Describe the major anthropogenic impacts on aquatic ecosystems.
4. Describe the role of nutrient cycling and stoichiometry across diverse aquatic systems.
5. Describe the major forms of adaptation in aquatic systems including phenotypic plasticity and evolution.
6. Identify the biological linkages such as material and energy flow within aquatic systems as well as linkages between aquatic and terrestrial systems.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Describe the patterns and causes of previous civilisations' rises and falls to appraise our current global environmental predicament within an historical context.
2. Explain and contrast the major global environmental issues that our civilisation faces.
3. Identify and analyze the fundamental biological root causes of our civilisation's current environmental predicament, and use that assessment to develop lasting personal solutions for coping with, and constructively responding to, the major global change issues of the 21st century.
4. Identify and organize the principal interactions among the major global change issues that ramify their impacts by developing and applying an over-arching conceptual framework.
5. Summarize the impacts of western "progress" based, individualist, and capitalist ideologies on humanity's relationship with the rest of the nature, and contrast those with the more holistic ideologies of Indigenous and eastern cultures.
6. Use concepts such as Progress trap, Global Planetary Boundaries, the Anthropocene, Deep Ecology, Socio-Ecological Stewardship, and Complex Adaptive Systems to discuss, evaluate, and critique potential solutions for addressing individual global change issues.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Describe and contrast the major processes and features that distinguish local terrestrial ecosystems, including farm-types.
2. Develop, conduct, analyze, and write a lab/field research study on a student-inspired question in agroecosystem ecology.
3. Explain and evaluate the major concepts underlying terrestrial ecosystem ecology.
4. Present a synthetic, logical, and individualistic seminar on a fundamental issue in agroecosystem ecology.
5. Synthesize, evaluate, and critique the potential solutions to meeting future global food demand.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Assess the status of fish populations based on information commonly collected by fisheries biologists (e.g. fork length, round weight, condition factor, stomach contents, age based on hard structures) so that we can determine the health of populations and take action to conserve them, or manage them more effectively if needed.
2. Demonstrate practical skills involved in working with fisheries data including data entry, organization and analysis to understand the health of individuals and the population, to understand demographics (e.g. age of population), their required habitat, and other biologically relevant factors so we can conserve or manage fisheries more effectively.
3. Demonstrate practical skills required to use different fish capture equipment including gill nets, trap nets, minnow traps and seine nets and apply these to sample fish communities.
4. Describe the basic principles of modern technology used in fisheries such as hydroacoustics and biotelemetry, the benefits and limitations of these approaches and demonstrate basic skills required to use this technology to sample fisheries.
5. Describe the most common fish species in Ontario and their basic life history in order to identify them and understand how different factors might influence their populations, so they can be properly managed and conserved.
6. Design sampling programs based on varying assessment techniques appropriate for different fisheries to be able to effectively monitor population levels.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Communicate conservation challenges and solutions from the viewpoints of different stakeholders in written and oral forms.
2. Critically explain and evaluate threats to biodiversity and alternative conservation solutions, ranging from solutions to specific conservation challenges to broader goals of global sustainability.
3. Discuss, evaluate, and reflect on the importance of biodiversity generally, and to humans specifically.
4. Hone the ability to work individually and in a team to produce high-quality and synthetic projects presented in written and oral form, applying strategies for time management and collaboration.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Compare and differentiate the major model organisms used to understand development at the genetic and molecular level.
2. Develop hypothesis-driven experiments to explain cellular behaviour to gain practical skills and methodologies used to understand how organisms develop.
3. Discuss the history of the study of embryonic development and how the basic concepts were formulated to develop a conceptual framework for the study of developmental biology.
4. Discuss, evaluate, and critique biological findings and ideas by reading and synthesizing results from the primary scientific literature, assessing their credibility, broad significance, and the limits to inference to gain experience in the writing of clear, concise and integrated reports.
5. Prepare high-quality, synthetic, and incisively written and oral projects, applying strategies for time management and collaboration to develop your ability to work individually and on a team.
6. Summarize biological questions, concepts, and results to a variety of audiences in written, oral and visual forms to improve your writing and communication skills.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Communicate the findings from integrating previous courses, literature synthesis and group discussions in a seminar format. Evaluate the effectiveness of seminars by colleagues.
2. Connect the effects of abiotic or biotic stress from genetics and cellular to the physiological and ecological processes of organisms.
3. Describe the cellular basis of adaption that organisms use in response to biotic and abiotic stress.
4. Integrate single-stressors process within groups to describe the range of adaptations for suite of stressors.
5. Prepare a communication strategy to transition scientific insight about adaptation to stressors to a general public audience.
6. Synthesize the literature on the effects of a single stressor and critically evaluate the limits of scientific understanding.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Analyze data commonly used in genomics (e.g. FASTA, FASTQ, SAM, BED, BAM) to answer biological questions.
2. Apply regular expressions to manipulate biological data.
3. Create publication-ready visualizations of biological data.
4. Design and implement a strategy for project management in biological research, based on the philosophy that scientific research should be OPEN and REPRODUCIBLE.
5. Write custom scripts to curate, merge, subset, reformat, and parse large biological datasets.
6. Write programs for 'big data' in biology, using high-performance computing infrastructure maintained by Queen's Centre for Advanced Computing.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Analyze and report on an important controversy in the history of biology.
2. Discuss and debate philosophical issues related to evolutionary biology.
3. Identify some of the major discoveries in the history of biology.
4. Investigate, discuss, and assess the contributions of biology to general philosophical issues.
5. Read, analyze, and summarize one important book in the history of biology.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Outline the historical development of the modern synthesis of evolution by natural selection.
2. Explain how evolution generates biological diversity.
3. Investigate genetic models simulating how gene frequencies change in populations over time.
4. Produce professional oral and written critiques of current evolutionary research literature.
5. Assess and discuss the impact of genomics technology on traditional population genetics.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Define micro- and macroevolution, and articulate alternative views on the importance of distinguishing between them.
2. Discuss mechanisms of diversification and genetic mechanisms that contribute to origination of species.
3. Analyze DNA sequence data to produce phylogenetic hypotheses of evolutionary relationships, and use these to understand broad-scale patterns in speciation and macroevolution.
4. Describe major events in the history of life on Earth including organismal diversification in the Ediacaran Period, the Cambrian Explosion, and mass extinction events, particularly at the ends of the Permian and Cretaceous.
5. Express the importance of different approaches to understanding origins and patterns of diversity including palaeontology, biogeography, genomics, and evolutionary developmental biology.
6. Critique articles from the primary evolutionary literature, distil their most salient conclusions, and situate these findings in the broader context of evolutionary biology.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Attain a competent appreciation of current techniques in molecular biology as applied to a chosen problem in epigenetics.
2. Critically evaluate selected scientific literature and be able to lead discussions on this literature, both in writing and verbally.
3. Devise a novel approach to further our understanding of a selected epigenetic phenomenon.
4. Integrate epigenetic discoveries and biotechnology with the ethical concerns of our times.
5. Integrate epigenetic mechanisms in an understanding of genetic regulation in diverse organisms.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Critically evaluate evidence available in the primary research literature to assess several evolutionary hypotheses to explain medical conditions, pathogen traits, and clinical outcomes.
2. Develop an appreciation for the benefits and impacts of the application of an evolutionary framework to considerations of human medical conditions.
3. Develop the ability to effectively synthesize and clearly communicate findings from their reviews and critical evaluation of scientific literature relevant to a topic of their choice in the field of evolutionary medicine.
4. Devise alternative hypotheses and predictions to address questions of relevance to evolutionary medicine, and analyze data and critically evaluate evidence to test among those hypotheses.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Apply fundamental scientific principles and critical thinking skills to independently develop and conduct a novel and discrete biological research study.
2. Demonstrate key professional skills, such as advanced laboratory and/or field biological techniques, effective proposal and manuscript writing, oral communication, critical evaluation of the literature, lab team-work, and problem-solving.
3. Verbally synthesize the study and defend the main research findings and their interpretation at a standard appropriate for a professional scientific conference.
4. Analyze and interpret the study results, and present them and an evaluation of their significance in writing at a standard appropriate for a peer-reviewed science journal.
5. Constructively critique the strengths and weaknesses of other students’ studies to refine and improve their scientific value.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Demonstrate the ability to use advanced lab and field biological techniques to conduct novel scientific research on a problem or question relevant to a particular faculty's lab group program.
2. Describe and evaluate the background information and contemporary arguments from the literature associated with that problem or question, so as to explain the rationale for its investigation.
3. Present the results of their experiments in a seminar format, discuss the implications of the findings, and orally defend the conclusions.
4. Present the research findings in the form of a manuscript or essay that is accessible to a broad audience ranging from experts to the general public.
5. Demonstrate key professional skills, such as laboratory techniques, effective writing, oral communication, critical evaluation of the literature, lab team-work, and problem-solving.
6. Constructively critique the strengths and weaknesses of other students’ studies to refine and improve their scientific value.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Demonstrate the ability to use advanced lab and field biological techniques to conduct novel scientific research on a problem or question relevant to a particular faculty's lab group program.
2. Describe and evaluate the background information and contemporary arguments from the literature associated with that problem or question, so as to explain the rationale for its investigation.
3. Present the results of their experiments in a seminar format, discuss the implications of the findings, and orally defend the conclusions.
4. Present the research findings in the form of a manuscript or essay that is accessible to a broad audience ranging from experts to the general public.
5. Demonstrate key professional skills, such as laboratory techniques, effective writing, oral communication, critical evaluation of the literature, lab team-work, and problem-solving.
6. Constructively critique the strengths and weaknesses of other students’ studies to refine and improve their scientific value.

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Demonstrate the ability to use advanced lab and field biological techniques to conduct novel scientific research on a problem or question relevant to a particular faculty's lab group program.
2. Describe and evaluate the background information and contemporary arguments from the literature associated with that problem or question, so as to explain the rationale for its investigation.
3. Present the results of their experiments in a seminar format, discuss the implications of the findings, and orally defend the conclusions.
4. Present the research findings in the form of a manuscript or essay that is accessible to a broad audience ranging from experts to the general public.
5. Demonstrate key professional skills, such as laboratory techniques, effective writing, oral communication, critical evaluation of the literature, lab team-work, and problem-solving.
6. Constructively critique the strengths and weaknesses of other students’ studies to refine and improve their scientific value.