The department occupies three floors in the Mary Ellen Jones Building, and has spacious research laboratories supplemented by several darkrooms, facilities for tissue culture, oligonucleotide and peptide synthesis, animal care, computer analysis, and P3 physical containment for hazardous recombinant DNA research. All the routine apparatus and instrumentation required for the most sophisticated modern microbiology research is available. Individual faculty members are provided with well-equipped laboratories for their own work and that of postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, technicians, and other personnel. In addition, several campus-wide facilities provide services such as DNA and protein sequencing, tissue culture, and flow cytometry, among others. There is a highly interactive collaboration with faculty in the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center .
Admission is competitive and limited to an entering class of approximately ten students each year.
A personal interview is generally required and occurs only at the invitation of the Admissions Committee. Applicants are therefore strongly encouraged to send in their completed applications as early as possible. Applicants are only admitted into the fall semester. The graduate program is strongly research oriented. Students admitted to the department generally do three laboratory rotation projects during the first year in the process of selecting a research preceptor.