The department research facilities are located in four buildings on campus. The main offices and some faculty laboratories are located in the Biomedical Sciences Building. The building also houses the research laboratories and the main offices of the other basic science departments within the College of Medicine. Several Microbiology and Immunology faculty are located in the newly constucted Stanton L. Young Biomedical Research Center, the University Research Park building and the Dean McGee Eye Institute. All the laboratory areas are fully equipped for modern research and include core facilities for molecular biology, monoclonal antibody production, gene sequencing and analysis, molecular pathology, fluorescence imaging, laboratory animal maintenance and advanced computing. The Department also operates the Bacterial Genomics Laboratory which is a state of the art gene and genome sequencing laboratory. The faculty members in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology maintain laboratories that are well funded by external research grants and contracts, a fact that attests to the excellent quality of work in their research endeavors. The department ranks in the top 20 nationally among Microbiology and Immunology Departments in funding provided be the National Institutes of Health. The grants and contracts are distributed among strong research programs in the focus areas of Infectious Diseases, Molecular Pathogenesis, Immunology, Virology and Genomics. In addition a number of internationally recognized adjunct departmental faculty also actively participate in the graduate training program. Individual faculty research grants and a National Institutes of Health Training Grant support the research of most of the graduate students and postdoctoral trainees within the Department. The robust research environment promotes scientific development with graduate students and postdoctoral trainees interacting in a variety of ways ranging from a strong departmentally funded seminar to weekly graduate student sponsored, research oriented discussion sessions. This experience builds a spirit of cooperation and mutual support characteristic of the Department.
