BioU offers in-depth nature study taught by the region’s finest experts and educators. Our students are weekend naturalists, working ecologists, and anyone with an insatiable drive to understand the pieces and patterns of our wild world.
You won’t find admissions committees, dean’s offices, or football teams here. At BioU, our star athletes swing insect nets. Our mascots are Arethusa orchids, Promethea silkmoths, and an orange slime of uncertain biological origins. Our campus comprises Vermont’s diverse wildlands, headquartered at the lab and classrooms of Montpelier’s North Branch Nature Center.
Spend a weekend or a week this summer immersed outdoors in a learning community of like-minded nature lovers.
General Information
**2020 Course Offerings Announced January 1st**
2019 Summer Field Course Offerings
About Biodiversity University
Biodiversity University satisfies a strong demand among adults for in-depth, immersive nature study. This university has no sports team, no admission’s office, and no deans or provosts. Instead, BioU has Vermont’s rich and varied assemblage of natural communities – wild places well-suited to intensive field study and creative learning – and a community of passionate and renowned instructors.
We recruit some of North America’s most skilled and enthusiastic biologist educators to lead field-based seminars across a range of disciplines rarely found at academic institutions. Course topics include botany, ornithology, entomology, meteorology, photography, illustration, writing and other creative and scientific endeavors. BioU offers insights into the forces of nature: the harmony and diversity in groups of organisms, the simple and complex interactions between the biological and the physical, and the skills for identifying life in the natural world.
713 Elm Street
Montpelier, Vermont 05602
(802) 229-6206
Hours: Center Open Monday-Friday 9-4
Trails Open 24/7
