Profile

The Faculty of Biology and Preclinical Medicine is concerned with research into the structure and interactions of living organisms. This is a very broad field, ranging from the small building blocks of cells to complete organisms including microbes, plants, animals and humans. At the Faculty we aim to explain how life arises, how life functions and how organisms interact and respond to environmental influences. Many questions that arise in the field of biology and preclinical medicine are of crucial importance to society. For example, biomedical research provides the basis for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. This is illustrated by recent developments in (RNA-based) medicine and the discovery of new molecular mechanisms that are important for the development of drugs to improve life expectancy and quality of life. Another example is that biological research provides the tools to understand how ecosystems respond to human impacts. This is particularly important as the pressing challenges of climate change and rapid species extinction will require our full attention in the coming decades.
Research and teaching at the Faculty of Biology and Preclinical Medicine aims to gain new insights into important questions in the field of biology and translational medicine, and to pass this knowledge on to future generations of scientists, teachers and society.