Starting with the Class of 2014, the Department of Biology is depositing undergraduate senior honors theses in the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR).  In May and June, 49 students deposited theses in the department’s Senior Honors Theses Collection.

Biology is one of Stanford’s largest undergraduate majors, with 300 students.  One hundred graduated in 2014, and about half of these submitted senior honors theses.  The theses cover a wide range of topics, from determining parentage in a population of harvester ants and phenotypic convergence obscures the biogeography of Anguillan Ameiva to the neural mechanism of social ascent: a novel role for isotocin and arginine vasotocin in behavior modulation during social flux and determining the role of gamma-glutamyl transferase 7 in glioblastoma tumorigenesis.

The Honors Program in biology requires students to complete a substantial and original research project in life sciences and to describe that research in a thesis that is written in the form of a biological research report.   The project can be completed in one of the research labs in the Biology Department or in one of the many other departments in which life sciences research is conducted.  Because theses describe original research, they can make substantial contributions to the literature of the life sciences.  Making this work available through SDR and discoverable through SearchWorks adds greatly to the value of this work in scientific discovery at Stanford and around the world.