Jerome Garcia, associate professor of biology and University of La Verne alumnus, shared his experiences as a first generation college student in a recent interview.

Alyssa and Stefanie Geiger, fraternal twins, sanitize test tubes for lab classes in the biology stockroom Wednesday.

Departments in the College of Arts and Sciences are struggling to balance the rate at which lab fees are spent and the amount of upgrades needed to keep its technology up to date.

Every year as the semester starts many students hand over both their tuition and a lab fee that is suppose to benefit them in their major. The departments are able to use these fees toward their budgets to care for the department’s equipment.

Christine Broussard, professor of biology, gave a faculty lecture titled “An Investigation of Non-genomic Effects of Selected Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals.”

After working with students and chemicals in the lab, Mark Nelson, professor of chemistry, heads home to his workshop where he creates prize-winning stained glass pieces.

Roberto Morales, assistant professor of chemistry, discussed the research he and students have been working on in his lecture “Synthesis and Characterization of Metallic Nanoparticles for Catalytic Applications.”

Faculty and administrators hope next year to begin construction of a new academic building.

What once appeared as inexplicable phenomena – such as how snowflakes are formed or why stars form certain patterns in the sky – will be explained through math and physics now that the University of La Verne has been awarded a $250,000 grant to fund a Complex Dynamical Systems Laboratory.