Our science departments are committed to creating and disseminating new knowledge in their fields by combining research and teaching. Our 300 faculty members — including fellows of many learned societies and academies — are engaged in research that spans a broad range, from questions about the foundations of quantum mechanics, to the development of cancer cells and the workings of the brain, to work resulting in the spin-off of high-technology companies. Faculty share their excitement about their research with their students, training them to become part of the next generation of scientists who will push the frontiers of human knowledge. Explore majors, minors, concentrations, and academic programs in the Natural Sciences.
News from Natural Sciences
All news »
We Love Our Supporters
Gifts to the College of Arts and Sciences can help our students make the most of their college careers. To do this, CAS needs your support. Your contributions help us ensure that teaching, research, advising, mentoring, and support services are fully available to every student. Thank you!
World-Class Faculty in the Natural Sciences
Thien Nguyen
Associate Professor of Computer Science
Thien Nguyen is an expert in natural language processing, or the ability of artificial intelligence to understand, interpret and generate meaningful human language. He aims to enable computers to perform cognitive language-related tasks. His lab is among the first to develop deep learning algorithms for information extraction and text mining in natural language processing and data mining. His research on using natural language processing for multilingual learning earned him a Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation.
Nguyen's recent research focuses on programming computers to improve the efficiency and safety of large language models (LLMs) across human languages while extracting valuable information about events like natural disasters, cyberattacks, disease outbreaks, and protests from news articles and other sources. His work seeks to deliver useful insights from diverse data and make these technologies accessible in low-resource languages that lack adequate data sets for training AI models.
Tien-Tien Yu
Associate Professor of Physics, Institute for Fundamental Science
Tien-Tien is a theoretical particle physicist working at the interface of theory and experiment. She is particularly interested in understanding the nature of dark matter, whose existence is known through its gravitational effects on ordinary matter. She co-founded the SENSEI collaboration, an experiment utilizing silicon chips, much like those found in digital cameras, to search for dark matter. She was recently appointed to P5, an advisory group convened once a decade by the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation to help determine the next funded projects in particle physics.
On Jan. 14, 2025, Yu was one of nearly 400 scientists and engineers to receive the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest award the US government awards to early career scientists.
A founding member of the group Particles for Justice, Yu is also a leader in advancing diversity, equity and inclusion in the physics field. In collaboration with the Comics and Cartoon Studies program, Yu created the UO Science and Comics Initiative. Read more about the initiative here.
Santiago Jaramillo
Associate Professor of Biology, Institute of Neuroscience
Santiago Jaramillo leads a research group dedicated to understanding how the brain processes and interprets sounds. Using advanced techniques to monitor and manipulate neural activity in mice, along with computational approaches, he investigates how the brain filters, learns, and assigns meaning to sounds and how brain disorders can affect these processes. His interdisciplinary work, supported by the BRAIN Initiative of the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, includes collaborations with psychologists, bioengineers, theoretical neuroscientists, and linguists, with the long-term goal of developing neural interfaces to improve human-to-human and human-to-machine communication.
Beyond the lab, Jaramillo is deeply committed to broadening participation in STEM. He provides hands-on neuroscience experiences to middle school girls through the SPICE program, serves as an advisor for international programs engaging young minds in scientific critical thinking, and mentors college students from a wide range of backgrounds through programs such as NSF STEP-UP, SPUR, and the ESPRIT scholarship for aspiring K-12 science teachers.
School of Computer and Data Sciences
The mission at SCDS is to empower a diverse population of students and faculty working to advance knowledge in computer and data science, train the next generation of scholars, and engage with the wider world to tackle interdisciplinary challenges.
To do this, we start by applying our knowledge and experience at home across the University of Oregon campus.
Research in the Natural Sciences
Natural scientists use data to understand, predict, and work with naturally occurring phenomena on earth and in the universe. From highly controlled experiments in the lab to observations collected in the field, our findings help make sense of the natural world while driving advancements in society and technology that touch everyone. By expanding the limits of human knowledge, we provide a scientific foundation for helping people live better, longer lives.
Explore Other Majors and Minors in the College of Arts and Sciences
Meet our Dean
Welcome to the natural sciences, where our top-flight researchers bring students in to experience the biological, physical, and computational sciences. Working side-by-side with faculty who are equally committed to student success and scientific discovery, students learn valuable critical thinking skills through hands-on research in the lab, field, and classroom—from studying marine biology at the Oregon Institute for Marine Biology on our beautiful campus on the coast to coding advanced systems and analyzing complex data in the School of Computer and Data Science.
The research we’re conducting at the UO makes a tangible difference in our communities, our nation, and the world. For example, our chemists are pioneering the materials and techniques that will inspire the next generation of batteries for energy storage. Our psychologists are developing and testing cutting-edge interventions to improve mental health and wellbeing. Our geologists and environmental scientists are collaborating with governments, tribes, and industry partners to protect communities from earthquakes and wildfires.
You may or may not end up in a science career, but either way these experiences will change the way you experience and interact with the world. A healthy society depends on people who know how to gather evidence and critically analyze data. No matter what field you enter, scientific thinking will help you become a more thoughtful, engaged, and critical citizen in modern society.
We’re excited to explore the natural world with you.
Elliot Berkman
Divisional Associate Dean, Natural Sciences
Happening at CAS
10:00–11:00 a.m.
Please join us Tuesday mornings for a free cup of coffee, pastries, and conversation with your history department community! We’re excited to continue this tradition for our history undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff. We hope to see you there!
4:00 p.m.
Michael Stern, associate professor of German and Scandinavian, will give a book talk on his new book Thinking Nietzsche with Africana Thought.
In the book, Michael Stern sets Nietzsche in conversation with Africana artists and philosophers to explore the role of aesthetics in decolonial worldmaking.
Nietzsche, a theorist of power, morality, and aesthetics supplies a description of a world making that also destroys. His notion of the will to power explains how particular and local interpretations spread and dominate. Stern situates Nietzsche’s thought alongside those of Africana artists and thinkers who, confronted with the effects of the slave trade and colonial violence, speak to new theoretical paradigms addressing erasure and displacement and its relationship to form making. Thinking Nietzsche with Africana Thought opens with Nietzsche’s work on the human imagination and its institutionalized restrictions, written around when the Congress of Berlin divided Africa without the presence of Africans. The book ends with the Ghanian sculptor El Anatsui’s understanding of temporality, form, and naming as he creates a slave memorial in a Danish setting.
Eschewing notions of hierarchal authority and keeping in mind how epistemological racism has delimited our philosophical possibilities, Michael Stern employs thought from each lineage to open the space for what Frantz Fanon calls a human with a new sense for rhythm. What emerges is a different sense for history, morality, culture, and political life.
4:00–5:20 p.m.
The Art Institute of Chicago has recently decided to deaccession and return to Thailand a 12th-century Khmer pilaster depicting Krishna, marking a major step in provenance research. Long misattributed to Cambodia, the piece was confirmed through archival, stylistic, and on-site study to have come from Prasat Phanom Rung in Buriram province, Northeast Thailand. Its return recalls that of the reclining Vishnu lintel in 1988, which originated from the same doorframe and was later reinstalled during the temple’s restoration. Both works had traveled from Bangkok to Chicago in the 1960s, reflecting the challenges of tracing Khmer artifacts. Reuniting them at Phanom Rung not only corrects past errors but also restores cultural meaning by returning them to their original context.
Presented by: Nicolas Revire PhD, Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice Research Fellow at Art Institute of Chicago.
Hosted by: Alison Carter PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon.
Event sponsors: Department of Anthropology, Global Studies Institute, Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, Department of History of Art and Archtecture, and Department of Asian Studies.
4:30 p.m.
The Creative Writing Program invites you to a poetry reading with Jan Verberkmoes.
Jan Verberkmoes is a poet and editor from Oregon. Her first poetry collection, Firewatch, was published by Fonograf Editions in 2021, and recent work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Lana Turner, and The Paris Review. Her writing has been supported by a Fulbright Fellowship to Germany, a John and Renée Grisham Fellowship, a Stadler Fellowship, and a Fairfield Fellowship from the University of Denver, where she is a PhD candidate in English and Literary Arts.
Free and open to the public.
For more information about the Creative Writing Reading Series, please visit https://humanities.uoregon.edu/creative-writing/reading-series