Maryville College Division of Natural Sciences

08/21/2025

Y'all, the latest cohort of our beloved Scots Science Scholars kick more tail than a kickboxing tournament, and we're here for it! Check out some of the amazing opportunities they were able to take advantage of during their two-week orientation before the rest of their peers arrived on campus!

08/20/2025

Last week, Dr. Drew Crain led almost a dozen volunteers deep (at least a hundred yards or so!) into the Maryville College Woods to harvest this year's fruit from the orchard trees! Apples and pears by the bushel were collected, a good time was had by all ... and then today, those same fruits were delivered to the Maryville College Downtown Center, where Dr. Crain's fellow Natty Sci colleague, Dr. Nathan Duncan, handed them over to students in his Introduction to Fermentation Sciences class to grind up and juice in order to make hard cider!

Y'all ... it's the first day of classes, and Scots are already getting hands-on experience in self-sufficiency, sustainability and brewing, without ever leaving campus! (Unless the walk to the Downtown Center counts ...)

When we say "everyday unexpected," we mean just that, especially in the Division of Natural Sciences: Scots never know, from one day to the next, what the next class may deliver in terms of broadening their skills, increasing their knowledge and providing them with experience.

It's gonna be a great year, we can feel it! Go Scots!

08/16/2025

Wildlife photography calendars! Get yer wildlife photography calendars, right here! Every featured photographer in this thing studied under our own Dr. Drew Crain, whose passion for documenting nature on film (or, in this case, via pixels) is unparalleled, and the photos are STUNNING! Check out the link to see examples of a few!

Dr. Drew Crain's Maryville College wildlife photography students have submitted their best work to the 2025-26 calendars that are now on sale.

06/17/2025

Hey hey, check it out ... and sign up! Dr. Crain and Dr. Duncan wanna teach you a few things!

Hey, Maryville College friends and followers, looking for some summer fun that doubles as a learning experience? We've got you covered!

We're proud to introduce the next round of public workshops led by some of our esteemed faculty members from the Maryville College Division of Natural Sciences, designed to help you build your homesteading skillset and perhaps pick up a few new hobbies!

First up, on July 12, Dr. Nathan Duncan will conduct the first of a two-part homebrewing workshop that includes all of the supplies you'll need to make your very own homebrew. You'll come back on July 26 to bottle it and wrap everything up, and if you've ever sampled some of the libations brewed by Dr. Duncan's Fermentation Science students (like you'll be able to at Saturday's Hops in the Hills Craft Beer Festival in downtown Maryville), then you know he's a guy with a palate for the unique who can show you all the tricks of the trade to create a beer reflective of your style and personality.

On July 24, Dr. Drew Crain will fill in for your grandma, in the event she didn't pass the secrets to home-canning along! Water-bath and pressure canning will be the topic du jour, so if you have a garden that's about to overflow with vegetable bounties, come learn how to preserve it!

Finally, Dr. Crain returns on July 31 to teach you how to make some delicious mozzarella cheese using only three ingredients! You saw the pictures of his cheese-making class last year, and many of you asked how you could get in on the action ... well, now you can!

All of the details, as well as the link to sign up and reserve your spot, can be found here: https://www.maryvillecollege.edu/about/downtown-center/home/

All of the classes take place in our brand new Maryville College Downtown Center, and if you've never dropped in to see what it's all about, this is your chance. We're excited about collaborating with our neighbors to enrich their lives through these lifelong learning opportunities, so check it out, sign up, and we'll see you next month!

03/27/2025

Experiential learning is what we're all about at Maryville College, and few places allow us to do that more than the teaching kitchen at the Maryville College Downtown Center! For his Fermentation 201 class on March 17 — St. Patrick's Day! — Dr. Nathan Duncan added some extra work to the usual beer-brewing process, exploring some of the food and beer associated with the holiday.

"We cooked a corned beef and discussed the history of the dish and what makes it preserved by chemical means instead of by fermentation," Duncan said. "The students made a classic Irish bangers and mash by grinding pork and mixing and stuffing the sausage, and we also made a turkey meatball version for those who didn't eat pork.

"We made a beer-braised cabbage dish using the stout we brewed earlier this semester, and we topped it all off with a stout-based onion gravy."

Thanks to a great number of pioneering professors in the Division of Natural Sciences, the Downtown Center is getting a thorough workout every week, and by all accounts, it's one of the coolest spaces on (or in this case, near!) campus in which students get their hands dirty while learning broad lessons that extend beyond the simple catalog descriptions of the courses for which they sign up.

Also: YUM!

03/25/2025

One of the best things about our division is that the liberal arts foundation that's a cornerstone of an MC education allows our faculty members a wide latitude when it comes to hands-on learning! From turtle tracking to cheese-making to beer-brewing to biodiversity lab in our own Woods to bird-watching forays into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and so many more, the Scots who take course in the Division of Natural Sciences spend almost as much time doing fieldwork as they do in the classroom!

Take, for example, two recent expeditions led by the intrepid Dr. Drew Crain! The top three photos are from a March 1 volunteer work group of students, faculty, staff and community members into the MC Woods, where efforts around the springhouse included the removal of invasive, non-native Chinese privet and bush honeysuckle, and the planting of native cardinal flowers (Lobelia cardinalis) and beebalm (Monardia didyma).

The other four photos (and video) are from a recent field trip to Conservation Fisheries, Inc., where Dr. Crain's environmental science students learned how the organization restores threatened and endangered fish species native to steams near campus, including Abram's Creek and Citico Creek.

The knowledge imparted by the later inspires Scots to donate their time and sweat equity to projects like the former, which is exactly what our founder, the Rev. Isaac Anderson, had in mind when he urged the first classes at his institution to "do good on the largest possible scale!"

02/04/2025

Last week, Dr. Drew Crain took students in his EVS-117 (Introduction to Environmental Science) lab to the City of Alcoa's Water Treatment Plant. It's one of the most critical services provided by the Alcoa Public Works and Engineering Department — safe drinking water, and the facility on Sam Houston School Road in Blount County is rated for a capacity of 16 million gallons a day, making it the largest membrane water filtration plant in the state of Tennessee. Students were able to see how water from the Little River, the county's main waterway, is treated and tested before going into the water lines of city residents!

01/27/2025

Back before winter tightened its iron grip on the region and turned the ground into concrete, Dr. Drew Crain and his gardening intern, M'Kaylee Holley '26, harvested turnips from the MC Gardens beside Crawford House! Winter gardening requires commitment, but here at MC, we know all about the meaning of that word, especially with educators like Dr. Crain encouraging us to "grow good on the largest possible scale," or something to that effect! From the greens to the turnips themselves, they made for good eating, and are a harbinger of scrumptious things to come as we drift into spring!

12/05/2024

Now THIS was a blast! Thank you, Dr. Unger and Dr. Duncan, for being such good sports!

11/25/2024

It all boils down to this for students in the Maryville College Division of Natural Sciences — the annual Natural Sciences Symposium, which was held Friday in the Lawson Auditorium!

Jordan Crain '26, Grace McDonald '25, Gabe New '25, Kaitlin Koster '25, Hannah Phillips '25 and Madison Taylor '25 were among those presenting the culmination of their extensive efforts in the lab and in the field to an audience of their peers and faculty mentors. If you kept up with our "FIPSE summer" series we shared about a couple of months ago, then you know full well how complex these projects were, and for good reason: Just take a look at the awards this particular group of Scots won last April, during the Celebration of Student Achievement:

Crain, a junior Biochemistry major received the Outstanding Performance in Organic Chemistry Award ... Phillips, a senior Biology major, received both the John Nichols Statistics Award and the Susan Allen Green Award presented to the most outstanding Biology major — an honor she shared with McDonald!

When all was said and done, Koster earned the distinction of "best presentation" for "Stream Health in the Little River in Townsend, TN, as Determined by Biological Indicators, Aquatic Macroinvertebrates."

It's one of the watchwords on our Covenant Stone — scholarship, and MC has long been a place respected for its rigorous academics. When our best and brightest demonstrate they've answered that calling, we're not only proud of their work ... we can't wait to see what they do next!

11/12/2024

The Windy City may never be the same after five Scots from the Division of Mathematics and Computer Science and our own illustrious division hit up Chicago Nov. 8-10 for the S-STEM PI and Scholars Meeting!

According to Dr. Angelia Gibson, who co-leads and accompanied the group, “Students attended sessions on professional development, mingled with other S-STEM students and faculty at poster sessions and networking sessions, visited with representatives and job and recruitment fairs, and had professional headshots made. Leadership team attended workshops and poster sessions on grant funding, research-based best practices for supporting STEM students, and best practices for administering grant-funded programs. The team also spoke with NSF Program Officers about future programming.”

While in town, they took advantage of the opportunities to hit up some Chicago hotspots like The Bean, and ! All travel and lodging expenses were paid by the / AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), which recognizes the strength of MC’s STEM programs of study and provides opportunities for such cool travel and networking.

Congratulation, , , , and Camden Johnson!