Undergraduate

Academic Overview

The Department of Environmental Toxicology hosts two academic focus areas:

Environmental Toxicology and Forensic Sciences! Both focus areas are interdisciplinary and encompass dynamic and rapidly evolving fields.

Environmental Toxicology is a multidisciplinary academic field that includes biology, chemistry, ecology to study our environment. More so, as practitioners in this field we are interested in harmful effects of chemicals, toxins and other physical agents on living organisms. We like to study our environment and different ecosystems to understand how toxic substances affect everyone - animals and humans!

Forensic science, also known as criminalistics, is the application of any science to matters of the law. During criminal investigations, many evidence items are recovered from the crime scene to understand the who, what, where, when, and why of what happened. Forensic science is a broad field and can include fingerprints, blood stain patterns, hair and fibers, entomology, taphonomy (the study of decomposition and decay processes), or even drug chemistry.

Students will work cooperatively to work through virtual crime scenes and practical laboratory scenarios together and arrive at possible hypotheses as to what happened. This will expose the student to various evidence items in a routine crime scene scenario, while understanding the process of evidence collection and association/comparison processes.

The field site component will expose the student to a natural environment where different variables play a role in the decay of an animal carcass. The field site is strictly observational and will allow to students to collect variables such as temperature, humidity etc. on site to formulate possible hypotheses.

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