We’re Hiring an Evolutionary Biologist

Grinnell is a highly selective liberal arts college with a well-deserved reputation for undergraduate teaching. An NSF report ranks Grinnell seventh per capita among schools from which science and engineering Ph.D.s received their bachelor’s degrees. Specific to biology, about a quarter of our graduates matriculate to graduate school and 83% of these students are accepted into their first or second choice program. See more about biology major career outcomes on our departmental webpage.

So, Grinnell students are an amazing and rewarding group to teach. Class sizes are small (~24 per class at the 100 & 200-level, ~12 per class at the 300-level in biology), and the high priority placed on advising means students and faculty get to know each other well.

The teaching load for the average faculty member is five (5) course equivalents per year, with lectures counting as one (1) course and labs counting as half (0.5) courses. Our department is purposeful with the synchronization of curriculum across lectures and labs, so students have the same professor for both components. This is intended to reduce artificial barriers between the classroom and laboratory. As a result, a typical yearly teaching load for a biology faculty member would be three courses, each with a lab (3 x 1.5 courses), plus another half (0.5) course from somewhere, such as a half-credit Readings in Biology course.

Note, however, that the first-year teaching load for new tenure-track faculty is reduced to four (4) course equivalents. Further, all faculty are guaranteed a one-semester (3 course) leave prior to tenure.

Teaching at Grinnell can take place in many settings. Beyond traditional lecture halls and labs, there are opportunities for course-embedded travel and wonderful teaching spaces at the Conard Environment Research Area (CERA), Grinnell College’s 365-acre remote campus that serves as a biological field station. CERA, just 11 miles from the main campus, boasts natural landscapes, ongoing long-term experiments, a research lab, and a LEED gold-certified Environmental Education Center, all of which support disciplinary and interdisciplinary learning across the College’s curriculum. CERA’s mission is to preserve and, through restoration, recreate a part of Iowa's vanishing natural heritage, providing a resource for the college and the broader community.

Given our research-forward curriculum and commitment to learning-through-doing, faculty at Grinnell College are expected to be productive scholars. A significant mode of research across campus, and particularly in biology, is faculty-mentored student research in the form of Mentored Advanced Projects (MAPs). MAPs are popular and a part of our rich culture of student-faculty research. MAPs can be conducted during the semester or summer. Students earn academic credit for the MAP and are awarded funds to support the project. Summer MAPs come with a stipend to support 10 weeks of full-time research. Faculty also receive a stipend for supervising MAPs.

Beyond MAPs, the College provides support for faculty scholarship in a number of ways:

• Startup Funds: New tenure-track hires negotiate a startup package with the dean after being offered a position.
• Research Labs: All tenure-track faculty have dedicated research space in addition to office space.
• Faculty Development Funds: All faculty receive $3,000 each year to support their research. Faculty can also apply for up to $5,000 of competitive grants annually from the Dean’s office.
• Teaching Leaves: Faculty contracts are for nine (9) months, freeing up summer for research that can include grant-supported supplemental salary. Pre-tenure faculty are eligible for a one-semester research leave in their fourth year and can apply for a Harris Faculty Fellowship, which supports a full-year leave. Faculty are eligible for a full-year sabbatical with full pay after tenure, and after every 12 semesters of teaching thereafter.
• Grants Office Support: The College has an excellent grants office to help faculty apply for government grants and other external funding programs.

Grinnell College resides in the city of Grinnell, a community of approximately 9,000 people situated in rural Iowa. The College actively seeks to engage with the local community. All College-hosted events (athletic, fine arts, etc.) are free and open to the public. While many faculty members find the community of Grinnell a great place to live, Grinnell is located within a commutable distance from several larger Iowa metro areas, including Iowa City, Ames, Cedar Rapids, Cedar Falls/Waterloo, and Des Moines.

Grinnell College has a strong commitment to social justice, revealed, in part, by our need-blind admissions process. We do not consider ability to pay in making admissions decisions for domestic students, and we meet the full demonstrated financial need of all students we accept (including international students). The biology department is also active in diversity efforts. We’ve developed an innovative curriculum that seeks to promote the success of students from diverse backgrounds. We are also highly involved in institution-wide efforts toward the same goal, such as the Grinnell Science Project (GSP), which has been honored with the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring for more than 20 years of successful efforts to increase the number of students from underrepresented groups who earn degrees in the sciences.