Biotechnology
2025-2026 Program Review

The Biotechnology Department/Program provides the theory and skills necessary for entry into the biotechnology field, which uses cellular and molecular processes for industry or research. Biotechnology covers a wide array of subfields from biomedicine, pharmaceutical and biologic production/development, agriculture, forensics, and many more. Course work includes practical laboratory skills with emphasis on good laboratory practice, quality control, and regulatory issues in the biotechnology workplace. Completion of the A.S. degree also prepares the student for transfer at the upper division level to academic programs involving biotechnology. Completion of the Certificate is suitable for preparing the student for the biotechnology workplace at the support personnel level.

Several courses show disproportionately impacted groups. According to the data, BIOT 307 and 311 show female students as DI; BIOT 305 and 307 show Hispanic/Latino as DI. However, our program is very small with modest enrollments so at least some of those data are likely not reliable because a small number of students can sway the numbers. During regular review of these data, which groups are DI vary from year to year supporting this assertion. That said, BIOT 307, our introductory course, has larger enrollments and unlike the other courses there may be a weak signal in those data specifically. In addition to the college data for all courses/programs, Biotechnology as a CTE program also gets Core Indicator (CI) data for Perkins and Strong Workforce funding to support our other DI data. However, our program and sample size is too small to regularly get students in particular categories and/or get reported data for CI due to privacy concerns, so we cannot assess our performance on any of these indicators. As a result, it’s hard to say where we need to focus our efforts other than outreach and advertising to raise awareness of our program and bring more students in to increase the sample size and meaningful DI data collection.

We are currently working to make our program completely Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC), targeting the remaining courses that are not already. Candidate texts for the laboratory courses have been identified and we are currently transitioning these courses. I am currently exploring options for BIOT 301 and hoping to begin transitioning that course in the next year. This is critical to improve the accessibility of our program to DI student populations and increase enrollment. We have also moved BIOT 301 to being offered as a synchronous online course to improve accessibility, which has improved enrollment compared to on the ground sections in past years. I serve on Sheldon High School’s Biotechnology Academy (BTA) Advisory Committee. Sheldon HS in Elk Grove is one of the most diverse high schools in California. We also began offering a Dual Enrollment section of BIOT 307 with Sheldon’s BTA in Spring 2025. This seemed to be successful, so we have expanded the scope to offering three DE sections of BIOT 307 with Sheldon’s BTA in Spring 2026. We have also been trying to improve the training pipeline to industry jobs by working with other groups such as Sacramento Employment and Training Program (SETA) and Capital Impact, a local non-profit working to develop pipelines for students from training programs like ours into industry jobs, to develop internships and better engage with regional Biotechnology industry partners. We are trying to participate in Capital Impact’s Biotechnology Partnership initiative to facilitate collaboration between educational institutions and industry partners in the greater Sacramento region. We are also members of BioMADE, a Department of Defense funded Biomanufacturing consortium. I served as a BioMADE Education and Workforce Development committee member for one term in recent years. We also participate in the BioTECH SYSTEM facilitated by UC Davis’ Biotechnology program to foster collaboration between regional educational institutions, particularly high schools and community colleges. However, as a one person department, there is very limited time to really engage seriously with many of these groups/initiatives without taking significant time away from our current students and courses (see comments about faculty being stretched thin in response to question 6).

We are also continuing our previous efforts to provide research experiences to our students, including participating in SIRIUS II project, running Authentic Learning Experiences (ALEs) in BIOT 312, and REAL STEM Coalition student research group. REAL STEM presented posters at the SIRIUS II STEM Research conference at Sacramento State the last 3 years and are planning do so again this spring highlighting our American River Water Metagenomics project.

We're hoping to hire a new faculty member in 2026 with BIOT as part of their assignment, which will allow us to continue to offer these DE sections and possibly expand DE offerings going forward, though we want to avoid expanding DE sections too quickly to ensure that our DE offerings are sustainable long term. New faculty may also help with improving our outreach and recruitment efforts, as well as curriculum updates and development and continuing to move closer to ZTC for most/all of our courses.

We are currently exploring development of a Clinical Research Coordinator (CRC) training curriculum to incorporate into our Biotech program following discussions from the Biotechnology Partnership initiative indicating the need for such a training program in the Sacramento region. Los Rios and ARC have expressed interest in developing this program/curriculum, so after discussion with Derrick Booth, release time is being provided for this effort in Spring 2026 to begin curriculum development. We anticipate major program changes in order to incorporate this into the existing Biotechnology program. Inclusion of CRC curriculum into our Biotechnology program will impact how we develop marketing materials and outreach for our program, so we are waiting to put significant time into that until we can include CRC training, which will potentially expand our enrollments and interest in our course offerings. Some of the CRC courses will likely be offered online to improve accessibility.

More support for outreach and recruitment to increase enrollment and bring in more students from underrepresented groups since faculty are stretched so thin. This would improve our DI data and hopefully make it more useful to guide our efforts to eliminate DI. Biotechnology became an official department this year since for the past seven years I have been trying to keep up with teaching nearly all the BIOT courses, engaging with industry, updating curriculum, keeping the program afloat, writing Perkins and SWP funding applications, outreach/recruitment, etc. Becoming a department provides a tiny amount of FTE that we hoped would help with this, but 0.1FTE is not sufficient to really help much (petition for additional FTE was denied). We would also benefit from support for a permanent lab technician and/or instructional assistant to help in laboratory maintenance and particularly for lab courses to support DI students.

Faculty are stretched thin and have an impossible job to teach courses, maintain the laboratory and develop new lab activities, run the program and advisory committee, outreach/recruitment, industry engagement, etc. Lack of faculty time continues to prevent participation in many projects that would benefit students, such as BioSCOPE collaboration with other California community college Biotech programs to include supply chain activities into our program. Low enrollments outside of DE courses due to lack of community awareness highlights need for more resources for outreach and recruitment. Our Biotechnology laboratory is a very old lab space (20+ year old “temporary classroom”) with no space for biological safety cabinets and other equipment that limits what we can do in labs (e.g. animal cell culture that is in high demand from employers). This makes it very difficult to “show off” our facilities to recruit students, and a new STEM building with updated lab facilities is still years away.