The Department of Biology at the University of New Mexico is one of the biggest academic units in the state. The department is comprised of 35.5 tenure track faculty (plus two full-time administrators with biology appointments and a faculty member on long-term leave), 8.5 faculty lecturers, more than 1,300 majors, more than 100 graduate students, and 89 staff and research support positions. Our non-majors courses, which are now taken by nearly two thousand students each year, serve as key entry points for the allied health sciences. Collectively, our research activities generate 6–13 million per year, and the department is home to some of UNM's most prestigious academic programs and faculty. Our faculty are productive, publishing more than 100 papers per year, including a high fraction of the state's output in preeminent journals such as Science and Nature (from 2000–2007, 28% of all publications in Science and Nature from the state of New Mexico came from our department).