President Richard C. Levin and Provost Alison Richard announced this week the creation of a new department in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences -- FAS. The new department of ecology and evolutionary biology, which was authorized by the Yale Corporation at its last meeting, is expected to mount degree-granting graduate and undergraduate curricula in the fall of 1998.
"The biological sciences have witnessed extraordinary growth and diversification of activity over the past 30 years, and we believe that the time has come to reflect this prominence and breadth of activity in the way the biological sciences are organized," the President and Provost said in a letter to members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "Advances in the biological sciences are providing major new insights into the processes governing life, from the level of the molecule to that of whole communities of plants and animals. Yale students have a right to expect an education that encompasses this range of study, and we have an obligation to provide it."
Programs in the new department will complement and augment those offered by the department of biology and the department of molecular biophysics and biochemistry. Each of the three departments will have "an opportunity to sharpen its focus and strengthen its relationships to each other as well as to the Yale School of Medicine and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies," Provost Richard said.
The new department, the first in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences since 1961, is expected to provide for a considerable expansion in the undergraduate and graduate offerings in the disciplines of ecology, evolution and diversity of whole organisms. "The opportunities for Yale students represented by the new department are exciting, and I look forward to the enhancement of the undergraduate curriculum across the biological sciences that this initiative will provide," said Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead. The initial faculty of the department will include biologists Leo W. Buss, Robert Dorit, Junhyong Kim, Jeffrey Powell, Sean Rice, Margaret Riley and Gunter Wagner.
Provost Richard noted that, "Yale has great institutional resources to foster the development of this new department. No other university has both a major research museum of the quality and scope of the Peabody Museum of Natural History and a professional school of environmental management like Yale's School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. The new department will provide the basic scientific foundations undergirding the study of ecology and evolution. It will not only strengthen Yale's efforts in the biological sciences, but also enhance curation in the Peabody Museum, and complement the efforts of geology and geophysics in paleontology, of anthropology in human biology and evolution, of F&ES in the education of environmental managers, and of the physical science and engineering departments of FAS in environmental science."
Creation of the new department was recommended by the Task Force on the Biological Sciences after a year of intensive consultation with representatives of the biological sciences university-wide. President Levin and Provost Richard received further recommendations from a faculty working group that met this past year and consulted with the Biological Sciences Advisory Committee as well as faculty in other departments and colleagues nationwide.
The new department will be housed in recently renovated facilities in Osborn Memorial Laboratory and in the planned $30 million Environmental Science Facility, to be constructed adjacent to the Peabody Museum. An acting chair will be appointed to lead the department in planning the new structure and curriculum while a search is undertaken for an outstanding scholar and educator who will serve as chair, according to Provost Richard. She added that support for new faculty in the department will come initially from resources in the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies.