UC Berkeley will no longer offer the toxicology, physiology and metabolism or dietetics majors under nutritional sciences.
Instead, toxicology and physiology and metabolism will be consolidated into the new nutrition and metabolic biology major, or NMB. Additionally, dietetics was converted to a graduate program.
The decision to stop offering toxicology was made for a couple of reasons, according to the UC Berkeley Academic Senate — chiefly because of a lack of faculty with the specializations required to teach the major. The focus of the major is on toxicities that are both naturally occurring and produced by people. Students learn to deconstruct them at the molecular level to understand how they interact with and affect the health of organisms.
The Academic Senate has said toxicology “no longer has any faculty” capable of teaching it, and that likewise there are no research faculty with any such focus either.
“Toxicology is a major that prepares you for a pretty narrow and quite specific field of study and future work,” said professor and department chair David Moore. “The primary reason why it’s going away is because we don’t have any faculty that are doing toxicology.”
Moore added that many toxicology majors go on to pursue pharmacology and careers in “big pharma.”
Moore said the department had been short on staff for at least the past four years, as long as he’s been at UC Berkeley. He added that current students of the toxicology major will still be supported by campus.
The Rausser College of Natural Resources’, or CNR’s website said the new NMB major will have the same “learning outcomes” as the nutritional science: physiology and metabolism major, though its curriculum will be slightly different.
The other reason for this consolidation, as explained by the Academic Senate, was that the dietetics major had to be altered so that it would not be confused with the Accreditation Council for Education in Nutrition and Dietetics’ new policy, which requires a master’s degree to become a registered dietitian nutritionist. Dietetics became a graduate program as of last semester.
To some nutritional science majors, this change has been expected. President of the UC Berkeley Toxicology Student Association, Natalie Oh, said CNR advisors told her in 2023 that toxicology would likely be phased out in the future and that classes were already getting discontinued.
Current students in any of these three majors will have the chance during the “phase-out period” to switch into the new NMB major.
“All students currently in the track will be assured a path to graduation,” the Academic Senate said in an email. “During the phase-out period, they can switch to the new major, which has a similar curriculum, or follow a modified curriculum to earn the Toxicology major. The last graduating cohort of Toxicology majors was expected to complete the degree in spring 2025.”