Scientific discovery and innovation present enormous benefits and challenges for society including how we contribute to the health of our species, improve quality of life, drive economic growth, and protect our planet for future generations.
Claremont McKenna College’s new Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences will prepare our graduates with the competencies and skills that are required to engage with these rapidly evolving challenges, and their impacts on society, over the course of their careers. Our program will directly contribute to CMC’s mission to prepare students for thoughtful, productive lives and responsible leadership in business, government, and the professions through several key commitments:
- Science in the public sphere. Our courses, research, and extramural programs are grounded in problems that are in service to the public sphere and, as such, will involve collaborations with the broader CMC community including its departments, centers, and institutes. In particular, our curricula have a strong emphasis on writing and communication.
- Integration of the sciences: Our curricula emphasize the strong connections and recurring themes across scientific disciplines, providing our graduates with the confidence to work on new problems that do not fit neatly in traditional disciplinary silos.
- Integration of computing and data science in the curriculum. Every CMC student learns the foundations of programming, data visualization, statistics, and machine learning in the "Codes of Life" course. They will use these tools both as vehicles for hands-on scientific discovery and as foundational literacy to be applied in many other fields such as economics and public policy.
- Experiential learning. Our students work collaboratively on discovery-based projects in their coursework and through research experiences in faculty labs, as early as the freshman year. In conjunction with CMC’s departments, centers, institutes, and labs, as well as The Soll Center, new research and internship programs continue to be developed.
- A culture of inclusion. The department fosters an environment that is inviting to all students, regardless of their prior background or their predisposition to the sciences.
The department’s programs are organized around three major grand challenges related to the health of our species, our brains, and our planet: respectively, (i) Genomics, Systems Biology, and Health (GSH), (ii) Brain, Learning, and Decision (BLD), and (iii) Climate, Energy, and the Environment (CEE). These three priorities interrelate with one another and provide opportunities for important intersections with the study of psychological sciences, economics and business, government and policy, philosophy and ethics, and other disciplines at CMC. Collectively, our faculty have the breadth of scientific expertise and multi-disciplinary approaches that will allow us to evolve our programs as new challenges arise in the decades ahead.
Department News
Professor Lars Schmitz, Kravis Associate Professor of Integrated Sciences, has co-authored a new article that was published in Current Biology, entitled "The rise of pelagic sharks and adaptive evolution of pectoral fin morphology during the Cretaceous". Sharks first expanded to open water habitats and evolved fins with high aspect ratio during the greenhouse climate of the Cretaceous. Long and slender fins are considered to reduce the cost of transport of fast swimming in sea surface temperatures that were considerably higher than today.
Professor Ran Libeskind-Hadas, Kravis Professor of Integrated Sciences, has authored a new article that was published in the Journal of Computational Biology, entitled "Pairwise Distances and the Problem of Multiple Optima." The paper proposes a new algorithmic approach that efficiently summarizes the large number of optimal solutions that arise in a variety of problems in the life sciences including the inference of phylogenetic trees, the alignment of molecular sequences, among others.
Claire Vlases ’25: Setting a landmark precedent
Claire Vlases ’25 made a powerful impact on her hometown of Bozeman, Montana when she was in high school, galvanizing her community to install solar panels on the roofs of local schools and helping to shape the city’s Climate Plan.
Her motivation: She loves her state.
Celebrating progress toward CMC’s bright future
