Welcome to the Biological Sciences newsletter for fall/winter 2017! We’ve have a great start to the academic year, with our largest entering class ever (468 freshmen and 52 transfer students) joining the undergraduate degree programs in Biological Sciences and in Microbiology. Our graduate program is also growing, with 83 Ph.D. students and 15 M.S. students enrolled in Biological Sciences, and another 13 Ph.D. students in interdisciplinary degree programs. Fortunately, we welcomed four new members to our faculty this fall, in the areas of bioinformatics, disease ecology, and evolution. You’ll read about these and others in this newsletter, including Professor Emeritus Khidir Hilu and long-time graduate coordinator, Sue Rasmussen (page 8), who both recently retired after more than three decades with our department!