Facilities

NSU Halmos College of Arts and Sciences facilities are divided between two campuses: The Fort Lauderdale/Davie campus and the Oceanographic Campus.

Fort Lauderdale/Davie Campus

The NSU Halmos College is housed in three locations on the Fort Lauderdale/Davie Campus. The Department of Biological Sciences is in the Parker Building. These graduate students conduct research in this building as well as research laboratories at the Oceanographic Campus. The Mailman-Hollywood Building houses the Department of Conflict Resolution Studies, the Department of Humanities and Politics, and the Department of Communication, Media, and the Arts. The Don Taft University Center houses the Performing and Visual Arts Wing. This wing includes two theatres, art and dance studios, orchestra and choral rooms, and scene and costume shops.

Oceanographic Campus

The Oceanographic Campus is only 12 miles from the Fort Lauderdale/Davie Campus and is nestled at the end of Von D. Mizell and Eula Johnson State Park directly on the entrance channel of Port Everglades and within 100 meters of the Atlantic Ocean. The Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences is on this campus.

This 10-acre campus has five buildings. The most recent building—the NSU Guy Harvey Oceanographic Research Center—was completed in 2012. It is environmentally friendly and state of the art with 86,000 square feet of usable space. The building is silver LEED certified. The activities in this research building are multi-disciplinary to address national and international priorities in coral reef research in five thematic areas:

  • Impacts of global and local stressors;
  • geospatial analysis and mapping;
  • deep sea coral reefs and organisms;
  • genetic and genomic connectivity;
  • and hydrodynamics.

This building includes space for offices, research laboratories, collaboration, research training, and fieldwork staging. Laboratories are equipped with the latest technology for mapping and geospatial analysis, microbiology, genetics and genomics, histology, geology, ecological modeling, deep sea optical and vision, ichthyology, coral reef assessment, monitoring, and restoration, and wet laboratories for seawater usage and organism maintenance. The building houses a research library for the many disciplines of marine science, an auditorium, seminar rooms, a seawater purification and delivery system, and an outside experimentation facility. The facilities also include a SCUBA gear storage area and tank fill station for regular air and nitrox.

The research laboratories in NSU's Halmos College are located on both campuses and contain state-of-the-art equipment facilitating the study of some of the most pertinent questions in biology. Students have the opportunity to work directly with equipment including an Illumina MiSeq DNA sequencer, fully automated microplate readers, qPCR machines, and a host of microscopes including fluorescent, electron, and high-resolution/magnification light. These pieces of major equipment are complemented with well-stocked laboratories that contain supporting equipment including biological hoods, PCR machines, nucleic acid spectrophotometer and fluorometer, -80C freezers, cold rooms, gel electrophoresis, and other instruments. Faculty actively collaborate with additional diverse NSU investigators and laboratories, allowing researchers access to other instruments, including computational clusters, automated nucleic acid extraction platforms, cell sorters, and flow cytometers.