The forerunner of the College of Life Sciences, Yan’an University is the Department of Biology, Yan’an University, which was founded in 1987, and was reorganized into the College of Life Sciences in 2002. For nearly two decades, the faculty has been working diligently, and has fostered a batch of excellent talents for the teaching, research, production technology and administration of life Sciences, and has made great contributions to the construction and development of Northern Shaanxi, and even the whole Shaanxi Province and the whole nation. In recent years, the college has attained remarkable achievements in teaching, research, disciplinary construction, and faculty training, and its comprehensive strength has been increasingly strengthened.

At the present, the college has 43 members of faculty, of which one advises doctorate students, ten advise master students, five are professors, 12 are associate professors, and nine are lecturers. Eight faculty members have doctorate degrees, 17 have master’s degrees, and two are designated as forerunners of key discipline at university level, which forms a quite strong teaching and research group with a reasonable structure in terms of educational background, academic relationship, title and age.

The college has three senior college programs in life Sciences, biological technology, and landscape art, one junior college program in education of life Sciences, and two graduate programs in genetics and ecology, which are also key disciplines at university level. Teaching activities are organized via six teaching and research offices of Botanical Biology, Zoological Biology, Microbiology and Pedagogy of Secondary Education, Genetics and Cytological Biology, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and Landscape Art. Three courses of Genetics, Biology, and Human Anatomy and Physiology have been built up as quality courses at university level.

The college also has a laboratorial center (including12 professional laboratories for teaching and research), equipped with advanced instruments and modern facilities worth over seven million RMB yuan. The college has a professional reference room, which subscribes over 80 Chinese and international journals, and houses over one hundred thousand books. The Specimen Room treasures up over 5000 animal and plant specimens, of which there are over 50 specimens of rare and protected species, including the giant panda.

Built upon this college, Shaanxi Regional Engineering Technological Research Center for Nursing and Utilizing Biological Recourses has been built. The college sticks by the schooling guidance of “establishing the college by teaching, strengthening the college by research, and developing coordinately”, fosters the educational idea of “progressing contemporaneously, taking human beings as the basis, serving the people (students), and developing ourselves”, follows the principle for disciplinary construction and development of “curricula arrangement synchronizing with the demands of market, and hardware construction synchronizing with the level of development”, embodies the mentality for scientific research of “highlighting regional characteristics, serving economic construction, and promoting sustainable development”, carries out the professional educational mode for the teaching programming of “initiating guidance and amending institution” and “3+1”, and implements the guiding principle for student life of “strengthening the practical teaching link, highlighting education of the makings, and self-development”, which has the college make considerable development in all aspects.

In terms of teaching, during the past over ten years, the college has turns out 900 senior and junior college graduates of different fields of study, who can be found almost allover the nation, and most of whom have become the backbone of teaching, research, technology and administration. At the same time, similar graduate programs of other universities and college have admitted over 60 graduates of this college.

In research, the college has attained a batch of achievements that are influential at home and internationally. It is only after the Ninth Five-Year Plan that the college has catered to the regional economic construction, and undertaken over 30 research projects at national, provincial and city levels, and has won more than ten prizes, of which four are at provincial and ministerial levels, two have been provincially appraised as “having achieved international advanced level of the same research”, and one has been provincially appraised as “having achieved domestic advanced level of the same research”. The college has published nine monographs, over 400 research papers, of which 20 have been included in SCI, and over 100 are in referred journals.