TSU’s College of Agriculture adds new program in Biotechnology

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (TSU News Service) – Tennessee State University’s College of Agriculture, Human and Natural Sciences has received approval from the Tennessee Board of Regents to begin offering a concentration in Biotechnology within the Bachelor of Science degree in Agricultural Sciences.

The Biotechnology concentration will join Agribusiness, Agricultural and Extension Education, Animal Sciences/Pre-Veterinary Medicine, Applied Geospatial Information Systems (GIS), Food Technology, and Plant and Soil Sciences within the B.S. degree.

“Biotechnology is a field with vast potential for crop improvement that can achieve resistance to drought, disease and pests,” said Dr. Chandra Reddy, dean of the College of Agriculture, Human and Natural Sciences. “This field and this improvement are necessary to achieve worldwide food security.”

The new concentration will provide hands-on training and first-rate knowledge to students in what, according to the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, is one of the job fields with the most demand for employment.

“This concentration will help train our students in the modern field of biotechnology using the latest gene sequencers and other state-of-the-art equipment,” Reddy added. “Our goal at TSU is to train our students in these modern agricultural technologies so that they find gainful employment and become future leaders in these high-demand fields.”

A concentration in Agricultural Biotechnology can lead to a variety of challenging careers, including Biomedical Engineering, Epidemiology, Forensic DNA Analysis, Microbiology, and many more.

To help accommodate this and other new programs in high-demand scientific fields, the College of Agriculture, Human and Natural Sciences has been focused on strategic expansion.

“To make sure that our students get the best training, we have been hiring first-class geneticists, equipping our labs with modern equipment, and constructing a 25,000 sq. ft., 8-million dollar Agricultural Biotechnology Building which will be ready along with the new concentration in January 2014,” Reddy said. “We are quite excited about the future of agricultural biotechnology at TSU.”

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With nearly 9,000 students, Tennessee State University is Nashville’s only public university, and is a comprehensive, urban, co-educational, land-grant university offering 38 undergraduate, 22 graduate and seven doctoral programs. TSU has earned a top 20 ranking for Historically Black Colleges and Universities according to U.S. News and World Report, and rated as one of the top universities in the country by Washington Monthly for social mobility, research and community service. Founded in 1912, Tennessee State University celebrated 100 years in Nashville during 2012. Visit the University online at tnstate.edu.