The background for biology in this department goes back to the beginnings of academic biology in the United States which started with the appointment of Louis Agassiz as the first professor of biology at Harvard University in 1854. He was a student of George Cuvier and, in his own right, was one of the most distinguished comparative anatomists, embryologists, and paleontologists of the last century. One of Agassiz's best students was the invertebrate embryologist William Keith Brooks who was appointed to head the Department of Biology at Johns Hopkins University when that university first opened in 1876.

Henry Van Peters Wilson, for whom our award is named, was a native of Baltimore, and after completing his undergraduate work at Hopkins, stayed on to complete his graduate training with Brooks. Among Brooks' students at the time were T.H. Morgan and E.B. Wilson, two of the most distinguished names in American genetics and cell biology.

H.V.P. Wilson came to the University of North Carolina in 1894 as the first professor of biology at this university. His most memorable work was on the regenerative capacity of sponges and the ability of their isolated cells to sort themselves out from mixtures with cells of other species, and for the reaggregated clusters to reconstitute new sponge bodies. The theoretical importance of this work was in its support of the "cell doctrine" which asserted that "cells are the fundamental units out of which animal and plant bodies are constructed." The species-specificity in the sorting and reaggregation of Wilson's sponge cells substantially helped to establish the cell concept as we accept it today.

The Department of Biology presents the H.V.P. Wilson Award to a senior undergraduate for excellence in research in cellular and molecular biology.