About the Department: Overview
The Department of Animal and Plant Sciences (APS) is one of three departments within the School of Biological Sciences, together with Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (MBB) and Biomedical Sciences (BMS). The School is characterised by its size and breadth of research, the quality of its research (ranked 3rd in the UK, RAE 2008) and the quality of its teaching (rated 24/24 in the last QAA review). The departments are separate units but there are a number of interdisciplinary points of contact.
Research and teaching within Animal and Plant Sciences is focused on whole organism biology, using a wide range of methodologies, ranging from remote sensing at the global scale to the latest techniques (e.g. genomics, proteomics) at the molecular scale. We aim to understand how organisms function, from the molecular level to their role in ecosystems. The Department is renowned for the diversity of organisms that it studies, with great strength in plant science, zoology and microbial ecology. This diversity, coupled with our size and international reputation, clearly places APS in the top league of organismal biology departments.
The Department is centrally located in the University, along with BMS and MBB, in the Alfred Denny / Firth Court complex. Centralized teaching facilities shared by all three Departments provide extensive and well equipped laboratory, lecture and computing facilities in the same building. On the same site we also have major new facilities for carrying out experiments under controlled environment conditions, and simulating aspects of global environmental change. The Department houses the NERC Biomolecular Genetics Facility, is equipped with laboratories for handling genetically modified organisms, and has excellent plant growth facilities at the Arthur Willis Environment Centre.
The Department of Animal and Plant Sciences currently has 40 academic staff, about 50 postdoctoral research associates, and a similar number of technical and clerical support staff. There are over 60 graduate research students working for PhDs, and about 450 undergraduates, on our BSc and MBiolSci courses.
All academic staff contribute to the Department's teaching, and our teaching draws strongly on our research expertise. This results in degrees that have the key current issues in biology at their core, provide opportunities to gain experience of current research methods, and benefit from wide-ranging research seminar programmes, featuring both internal and external speakers.
Recent externally compiled league tables confirm the Department´s standing in the international arena and demonstrate the contribution that it makes to the standing of the University as a whole. Two of the five indicators used in the Shanghai Jiao Tong ranking of world universities, which placed the University of Sheffield 7th in the UK and 20th in Europe, were the number of highly cited researchers and articles published in Nature and Science. Eight academics from Sheffield are listed as `highly cited´, of these five are in APS. During the last RAE review period (2001-2008) 42 out of 76 Nature and Science papers from the University were authored in APS.
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