Field Sites & Greenhouse
Ohio Wesleyan maintains multiple "living labs." At OWU, you'll find a campus arboretum, the Moore Greenhouse with almost 500 specimens from around the world, and two forested nature preserves a short drive from campus.
Plants are diverse and beautiful, and they're critical to ecosystems, climate regulation, and providing nutrition and medicinal compounds. The work of plant scientists is central to sustaining the global food supply, mitigating climate change, maintaining biological diversity, restoring degraded lands, and developing life-saving pharmaceuticals.
The Botany major offers a foundation in biological principles with specialized courses in plant physiology, plant genetics, systematics, and ecology. As a Botany major you learn to identify, alter or manage the diversity & complexity of Earth's flora.
Keywords: agriculture, botanical research, forestry, landscape design, horticulture, ecology, conservation, advanced research, laboratory science, field research, food supply, sustainability, environmental science, environmental education, health, medicine, pharmaceuticals.
Other majors in the Biological Sciences:
Biology | Microbiology | Biochemistry |
Zoology | Health & Human Kinetics | Neuroscience |
Environment & Sustainability | Genetics |
Original research, performed under faculty mentors, is a central component of The OWU Connection.
Students are encouraged to seek distinctive learning, research, and field experiences, which can include independent study, summer research at OWU or other institutions, or OWU-funded Connection Grants. You can present your research at the Student Symposium in the spring.
From your first year on campus, you can get off campus with Travel-Learning Courses, a key part of The OWU Connection. Journey to a distant land and immerse yourself in another landscape and culture.
Recent Travel-Learning Courses have taken botany and biology students to Brazil, Costa Rica, East Africa, the Galapagos Islands, and Alaska.
Botany students have held internships at New York's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University, Michigan State's Plant Genomics Program, the Morton Arboretum at the University of Chicago, and the Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis.
Students can receive OWU-funded grants to put theory into practice, in lab and field research around the world.
OWU faculty are outstanding scholars and researchers—and passionate teachers. They will push you, challenge you, inspire you, and work with you on your own research and creative projects.
They can even pack a 3-minute lecture with ideas, insight, and imagination. Check out our unique I³ lectures.
Ohio Wesleyan maintains multiple "living labs." At OWU, you'll find a campus arboretum, the Moore Greenhouse with almost 500 specimens from around the world, and two forested nature preserves a short drive from campus.
Students have the opportunity to engage full-time in original research with faculty mentors, with free on-campus housing and a generous stipend for 10 weeks in the summer. Students present their findings at an all-college symposium and often also at national and international conferences.
OWU's herbarium (botanical museum), housed in the Schimmel Conrades Science Center, contains some 16,000 pressed and dried plant specimens from around the world, many of them dating back to the 1800s. Today the collection is actively used in teaching botany courses and for student research.
The Botany & Microbiology Department presents three major student awards each spring The awards, which recognize academic and research excellence and service to the department, all include monetary gifts.
Jenna is a graduate research assistant at Penn State University, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in plant biology. She majored in Botany and Chemistry at OWU.
Recent biological science grads are attending graduate programs at the following universities: Auburn, Case Western Reserve, Cornell, George Washington, Michigan State, Pennsylvania State, Purdue, Ohio State, Vanderbilt, and Bren Fellow, Rio de Janeiro
OWU biological science graduates are working around the globe in highly varied fields. Examples of employment include: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Chemical Abstracts Service, Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, Mayo Clinic, Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics, Ohio Seed Improvement Association, Tiger Optics.