Guide to Grad Studies

2022-2023

This Guide outlines the policies and procedures followed by the Department of Biology with respect to Graduate Studies. Graduate studies at Queen's are administered under the regulations of the School of Graduate Studies and Research as described in the current Graduate Studies Calendar. Thus this Guide is meant to extend and interpret, for the Biology Dept, the regulations of the School of Graduate Studies which are, of course, the ultimate authority on many of these subjects. Links to some of the relevant documents on the school of Graduate Studies website are provided below.

Coordinator: Dr. Vicki Friesen
Associate Coordinator: Dr. Sharon Regan
Graduate Studies Committee: Drs. L. Aarssen, Wm. Bendena, F. Bonier, R. Colautti, G. diCenzo,  V.L. Friesen,  J. Monaghan, J. Smol, W. Snedden
Graduate Studies Assistant:  Joanne Surette
Graduate Student Reps:  Troy Martin
Graduate Office: Room 3109b BioSciences Complex, email: surettej@queensu.ca; phone 533-6138,

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

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Biology Graduate Studies Committee
2. Applications and Admissions
3. Financial Support of Students
4. Student Responsibilities and Professional Conduct
5. Supervisory Committees
6. Collaborative Research
7. Research of a Confidential Nature
8. Safety in Lab And Field
9. Course Requirements
10. Graduate Courses in Biology
11. Transfer from MSc to PhD
12. PhD Qualifying (Comprehensive) Exam
13. Time Limits for Completion
14. Thesis Formats and Exit Seminars
15. Thesis Defenses
16. Review of Academic Decisions

APPENDIX Teaching Assistantships

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