Master's in biology

With the unfolding nature crisis, competence on nature, species and ecosystems and how they operate is key to predicting likely impacts of anthropogenic activities as well as identifying nature-based solutions. Many take on jobs within local or regional governments and are close to decisions and can shape ongoing impacts quickly. Others work at the national level in agencies that formulate or follow up regulations or more general processes and work on longer time horizons. Others again continue to work with knowledge generation using methods similar to those in the Master’s degree in consultancy or research to document nature impacts and work towards nature conservation or restoration, or in more long-term and fundamental research.

The urgent focus on sustainability goals is pervasive within governments at all levels as well as all kinds of businesses. Being a focus that is rapidly expanding, the felt urge and the willingness to start doing something often exceed the competence about the nature systems they are required to understand.

Research groups working with these themes:

Deep Sea Biology
Ecological and Environmental Change Research Group (EECRG)
Theoretical Ecology Group

Food production is a main component of anyone’s ecological footprint, and working towards more sustainable practices and seeing the complicated links and impacts between different types of food production is a growing and important field. Norway is big on seafood, both wild-caught and farmed, and has a long history of mostly small-scale agriculture combined with large imports. Improving practices, monitoring side-effects, uncovering unknown impacts and links, and optimizing the broad perspective of the green and blue food systems for their total impact on our globe is a growing and important field.

Research groups working with these themes:

Fjord and Coastal Ecology
Theoretical Ecology Group

If you are mostly interested in food production in aquaculture or fish health, you should consider the study programmes Integrated master’s in Aquaculture (norwegian only) and Integrated master’s in Aquamedicine (norwegian only) .

Many medicines and treatments important for human health today originated from methods or insights developed within fundamental biology. Pathogens are typically bacteria and viruses that can be studied safely in the lab or when they affect other species than humans. For example, the discovery that there are a billion viruses in each and every drop of seawater was made at the University of Bergen. The pollutants that affect humans affect other species too, and often there are example species with higher exposure than humans that can serve as model organisms to study the cellular and metabolic mechanisms and their potential health effects.

Research groups working with these themes:

Deep Sea Biology
Environmental Toxicology
Marine Developmental Biology
Marine Microbiology

If you are mostly interested in understanding molecular mechanisms and genetic engineering, you should consider the Master’s program in Molecular Biology. If your interests lie within fish health in aquaculture, you should consider the study programme Integrated master’s in Aquamedicine (Norwegian only).

Together with artificial intelligence, molecular biology and biotechnology are highlighted as the second rapidly developing frontier that will transform society at many levels in unprecedented ways over the coming few decades. Studying DNA and the computational and laboratory methods are one important pillar fueling this revolution, but it also depends on harnessing links to the existing knowledge and methods of organisms in their environments. Combining molecular methods with more traditional biological approaches is a rapidly growing field at the interface between the lab and the field, between DNA and the organism, and pushed forward by new technologies for microscopy, sequencing, and micromanipulation.

Research groups working with these themes:

Deep Sea Biology
Ecological and Environmental Change Research Group (EECRG)
Environmental Toxicology
Marine Developmental Biology
Marine Microbiology
Sea Lice Research Centre (SLRC)

If you are mostly interested in understanding molecular mechanisms and genetic engineering, you should consider the Master’s program in Molecular Biology.

While many of us motivated by focus on applications where biology is important to understand a societal problem and contribute to solving it, studying at a university, there is of course also room to ponder fundamental and for the moment seemingly unimportant questions. Some of the big outstanding challenges in biology include: how life originated; detailing the important steps over evolutionary history of life in general and humans in particular; explaining why there is sex; charting the largely unobserved ecosystems in the deep sea and other inaccessible environments; unfolding the evolution of decision-making, cognition, and consciousness.

Research groups working with these themes:

Deep Sea Biology
Ecological and Environmental Change Research Group (EECRG)
Marine Developmental Biology
Marine Microbiology
Theoretical Ecology Group

Prerequisites

The academic admission requirements for the master program  in biology are:

- A Bachelor's degree in Biology or a related discipline

- At least 60 ECTS credits in Biology

- A minimum of 7.5 ECTS credits in Chemistry with laboratory work

- A minimum of 7.5 ECTS credits in Statistics

- At least 7.5 ECTS credits in Mathematics (if the applicant does not have Mathematics R2 from secondary school)

Full programdescription: https://www4.uib.no/en/studies/programmes/biology-masters

You can find relevant courses under the project examples for each research area and should also be discussed with your supervisor.

All new students must, within the first few days after starting and before the start of teaching (week 34 in the autumn/week 3 in the spring), investigate which courses fit into their master's program. External students may have problems adding courses in Studentweb. If this applies to you, you must contact the study advisor (studie.bio@uib.no) to open the courses in Studentweb.

Please note that not all courses are taught in English, and that some courses are only available for program students at BIO. 100-level courses are introductory courses in Norwegian, mainly for bachelor students. 200-level courses can be taken by both bachelor and master students, while 300-level courses are for master and Ph.D. students.

https://www.uib.no/en/bio/54271/courses-department-biological-sciences-bio