Carleton is blessed with exceptional faculty members and exciting academic programs across our entire curriculum. In my next several columns, I will sing the praises of the research and teaching carried out in different academic disciplines, including the fine arts and the humanities. In this issue, I want to focus on Carleton’s glorious record of achievement in—and our exciting plans for—the physical and biological sciences.

Science always has been one of our college’s distinctive strengths. Currently, more than a third of our graduates major in math or sciences. Some 20 percent of our alumni work in scientific research or health care. Nearly 8 percent have studied for professional degrees in medicine, and 10 percent of our science and math graduates teach at the college or university level.

I’m particularly proud of Carleton’s success in training and encouraging women scientists. Bucking national trends, nearly half of Carleton’s science and math majors are women. And over the years, Carleton has consistently ranked among the top producers of women graduates who go on to earn doctorate degrees in the sciences.

Indeed, Carleton has a long and storied record of national leadership in science education. Since 1990 Carls have received 182 National Science Foundation graduate fellowships, placing our college third among all baccalaureate institutions. Carleton is one of only three undergraduate institutions in the nation to receive seven consecutive grants (totaling $6.5 million) from the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute for research and pedagogical innovation. It is particularly striking, in my view, how our success in garnering these hypercompetitive grants has led us to develop and refine an interdisciplinary approach to teaching science that enables our students to apply the knowledge they glean from their science courses to their work in other academic disciplines.

For example, students in physics professor Marty Baylor’s “Classical and Quantum Optics” course this fall considered geometrical optics from an art history perspective. They explored whether Renaissance painters may have used lenses and mirrors to project images onto canvas, which they then traced. Our students then focused their analytical attention to the details of Lorenzo Lotto’s painting Husband and Wife. To put their discussion into a broader context, art history professor and Renaissance specialist Jessica Keating joined the class to lend her insights on painterly techniques and meaning.

Here we have a prime illustration of how scientific inquiry at Carleton remains proudly embedded within a true liberal arts curriculum—an approach that prepares our graduates to meet the world’s growing demand for scientists who are problem solvers, imaginative thinkers, and effective communicators.

But Carleton is constitutionally incapable of resting comfortably on its laurels. So we are ever alert to what we should be doing right now to maintain our success in delivering a stellar science education. We must continue to attract the very best students, including those who want to become cutting-edge research scientists. We must continue to recruit and retain science faculty members who are both superior teachers and accomplished scholars who engage our students in critical research. Finally, we must ensure that our science teaching and laboratory facilities foster innovative research and instruction that are consonant with our proud record and bold aspirations in these fields.

Accordingly, Carleton’s recently completed Facilities Master Plan calls for targeted new construction and careful renovation of existing spaces to provide essential high-intensity labs, dry labs, tech-flexible classrooms, and faculty offices in and around Hulings, Mudd, and Olin Halls. The result will be a mix of scalable, sophisticated science teaching and research spaces that meet the increasingly complex instructional and scholarly needs of Carleton scientists and science students.

In addition, we will continue and expand our practice of collaborating with other leading research institutions and universities. Consider, for example, our relationship with the Mayo Clinic, which shares Carleton’s commitment to innovative excellence in the sciences. Our science majors participate in summer lab programs at Mayo, where they gain unique training that prepares them for medical school or careers in laboratory medicine. In turn, Carleton faculty members mentor Mayo graduate students and PhDs who are considering careers in teaching. This symbiotic partnership extends Carleton’s reach and ensures that our science graduates go out into the world with distinctive and career-shaping experience.

In thinking carefully about how we invest in the sciences and seize new opportunities for partnership, we safeguard and strengthen Carleton’s special legacy of providing outstanding science education within the context of the liberal arts for decades to come.