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Research Facilities

Minnesota has prairies, deciduous and coniferous forests, vast agricultural landscapes, streams, wetlands and bogs, as well as 14,000 lakes of diverse character including the largest lake in the world, an excellent landscape for ecological, evolutionary and behavioral studies.

EEB Graduate student Tanya Smutka (in back) studies plankton growth in Lake Superior with Professor Robert Sterner. (Courtesy of Tanya Smutka)

University field stations featuring unique ecological environments are frequently utilized by faculty and students for research. Popular courses are offered each summer at the Lake Itasca Forestry and Biological Station, located at the junction of eastern deciduous, northern coniferous, and prairie biomes in northwestern Minnesota. Modern winterized cabins and laboratories at Lake Itasca are available for year-round research. The 6,000-acre Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve, the site of a National Science Foundation Long-Term Ecological Research Program, is just 30 miles north of campus. The University of Minnesota is a member of the Organization for Tropical Studies consortium, which offers field station experience in Costa Rica to students interested in tropical biology and conservation. These are the most often utilized field stations by students in our program. There are many more!

Large Biodiversity Experiment at Cedar Creek Natural History Area. (Courtesy of David Tilman)

The research laboratory at Itasca Biological Station and Laboratories overlooks Lake Itasca. (Courtesy of Lake Itasca Biological Station)

Most EEB students have office and lab space in the Ecology Building on the St. Paul portion of the Twin Cities Campus. This building was dedicated in 1993. The Bell Museum of Natural History's outstanding reference collections of Minnesota fauna is also located in the building. The Ecology Building has five floors of modern laboratories and office space with molecular biology and genetics research facilities, animal care facilities, and greenhouse space. A large herbarium located in the nearby Bioscience Building is associated with both the Department of Plant Biology and the Bell Museum.

Biodale, an NSF funded facility, located next door on campus houses a modern sequencing, imaging facility, mass spectrometry, robot for high-throughput for screeing, and a number of other facilities. The Biotechnology Institute next door maintains laboratories with state of the art equipment for research and development in fermentation, animal cell culture technology, molecular biology, protein expression, and separation of a wide range of biological molecules.

The Ecology Building on the Saint Paul Campus.

Experimental evolution: Professor Antony Dean adjusts a chemostat to determine the fitness conferred by an engineered enzyme in E. coli.