Students At Work

Academic Excellence

The Jordan Hall of Science is Notre Dame’s commitment to academic excellence in undergraduate science education. It’s a bold step toward redefining the role of Notre Dame’s College of Science. Whether students are interested in chemistry, biochemistry, engineering, physics, or biology, Notre Dame is defining the kind of teaching and learning necessary for the 21st century by cultivating a life-changing experience for undergraduates. Read welcome from the dean of the College of Science.

Departments in the College of Science

Real world, real time, real life. How the Jordan Hall of Science facility supports our curriculum in a way that puts us on the cutting edge in science education:

  • Undergraduate education
  • Interdisciplinary collaboration
  • Real lab research environment
  • Advising on site
  • Integrates science into campus life
  • Fosters new discoveries

Enriches undergraduate education. The facility’s design provides multiple technology channels for teaching and learning that support Notre Dame’s trademark commitment to students, creative approaches, and honors dedication to teaching that give our students a distinct advantage.

  • Inquiry-based, integrative learning: interactive lectures with professor and peers, quizzes in real time via laptop, experiments conducted via video
  • Enhanced courses include lab components for Preprofessional students
  • The facility’s technology allows exposure to Nobel Prize winners and world experts to join classroom discussion
  • Instructors and students can produce their own spectacular star shows as part of the lesson for the day

Generates interdisciplinary collaboration, integration. The facility’s spaces and equipment support the science education trend toward multidisciplinary study and support collaborative learning and teaching.

  • Design spaces create an environment that offers students unprecedented opportunities for collaboration—ex, integration of engineering with life sciences
  • Students from across the university—from chemistry and civil engineering and geological sciences to art, art history and design and architecture—can experience their studies in a whole new light

Learn in a true laboratory research environment. State-of-the-art labs for conducting complex experiments support the mentoring students receive through collaboration with faculty as they do modern research in a safe and progressive scientific environment.

  • Few universities in the world can boast of having a single, modern facility where undergraduates can perform experiments using state-of-the-art research instrumentation in the course of their studies in biology, chemistry and physics. The labs provide pre-lab lecture space and data analysis rooms.

Center for Health Sciences Advising. Students interested in all health professions, regardless of their major, are able to go to one central location in Jordan Hall to seek advice and information. The advisors assist students with course planning, the professional school admissions process, and finding undergraduate research experiences. The offices are located in 219 Jordan Hall, phone: 631-4890.

Creates an environment for a new way to “live with science.” The Jordan Hall welcomes students. It helps integrate science into campus life with spaces conducive to living and learning—a snack shop, study areas, advisement offices, a resource center for undergrad research, and a beautiful common space outside. Here, science is not separate from artwork and art spaces, so that one can experience not only the function, but also the beauty and meaning of science.

Fosters new discoveries in the study of botany, ecology, evolution, biodiversity and conservation, regional and global environmental change, genetics, natural products chemistry, archeology, and anthropology, to name a few. The new Museum of Biodiversity will allow students to experience a vast array of naturally occurring substances--some of which may hold the key to new discoveries in drug treatments for diseases such as cancer.