Guide to Grad Studies

2023-2024

This Guide outlines the policies and procedures followed by the Department of Biology (hereafter Biology) with respect to graduate studies. Graduate studies at Queen's are administered under the regulations of the School of Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs (hereafter SGSPA) as described in the current Graduate Studies Calendar. This Guide is meant to extend and interpret the regulations of the SGSPA for Biology. The University has many resources related to graduate studies and student wellness – this document attempts to distill the most relevant information from those documents, and to provide links to some of the relevant documents on the SGSPA and other university websites. Faculty and students are strongly encouraged to read and refer to the Graduate Supervision Handbook, and General Regulations in the Graduate Academic Calendar.

Coordinator: Dr. Vicki Friesen
Associate Coordinator: Dr. Sharon Regan (July-Dec 2023), & Dr. Jacqueline Monaghan (Jan-June 2024)
Graduate Studies Committee: Drs. L. Aarssen, F. Bonier, I. Chin-Sang, G. diCenzo, V.L. Friesen,  D. Lefebvre, J. Monaghan, S. Regan, J. Smol
Graduate Studies Assistant: Biology Graduate Assistant
Graduate Student Reps:  Troy Martin
Graduate Office: Room 3109b BioSciences Complex, email: biologygradassistant@queensu.caphone 533-6138

All correspondence, enquiries, academic change forms and registration forms should be directed to the Graduate Studies Assistant @ biologygradassistant@queensu.ca, in the Graduate Office (Room 3109b). All forms mentioned in this guide are available on the Biology Graduate Studies website.   

Biology Guide to Grad Studies 

I've spent more time than many will believe [making microscopic observations], but I've done them with joy, and I've taken no notice those who have said why take so much trouble and what good is it?

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

It's a parts list... If I gave you the parts list for the Boeing 777 and it had 100,000 parts, I don't think you could screw it together and you certainly wouldn't understand why it flew

Eric Lander

What is true for E. coli is also true for the elephant

Jacques Monod

The world becomes full of organisms that have what it takes to become ancestors. That, in a sentence, is Darwinism

Richard Dawkins

Shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life?

Erasmus Darwin

Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it's impossible to determine the line of demarcation

Aristotle

Cells let us walk, talk, think, make love, and realize the bath water is cold

Lorraine Lee Cudmore

In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history

Charles Darwin

It is my belief that the basic knowledge that we're providing to the world will have a profound impact on the human condition and the treatments for disease and our view of our place on the biological continuum

J. Craig Venter

Imagine a house coming together spontaneously from all the information contained in the bricks: that is how animal bodies are made

Neil Shubin

A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct

Charles Darwin

The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors, assembled by a data tape whose information is copied, downloaded and scanned

Steven Pinker

We wish to discuss a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid. (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biologic interest

Rosalind Franklin

We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget

Mary Roach

The systems approach to biology will be the dominant theme in medicine

Leroy Hood

I've always been interested in animal behavior, and I keep reading about it because it's so surprising all the time - so many things are happening around us that we neglect to look at. Part of the passion I have for biology is based on this wonderment"

Isabella Rossellini

Because all of biology is connected, one can often make a breakthrough with an organism that exaggerates a particular phenomenon, and later explore the generality

Thomas Cech

Nothing in Biology makes sense except in the light of evolution

Theodosius Dobzhansky

Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century

- Freeman Dyson

Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third

- Thomas Huxley